GKE Autopilot Kubernetes Cluster with Pulumi Infrastructure as Code

This is the first part of articles to use Pulumi as infrastructure as Code (IaC) to create and maintain the infrastructure and deploy applications on Kubernetes cluster on the Google Cloud Platform GKE Autopilot and pipelines to automated everything with GitLab Pipelines.

Pulumi is one of best tool to use as infrastructure as code. This has been empowering and help many DevOps and Engineers teams around the world turn our lives better, less time on provisioning and operations toil, and provide to platform team delivery self-service infra products in efficient matters.

Installing required tools

• Google Cloud SDK https://cloud.google.com/sdk
• Pulumi https://www.pulumi.com/docs/get-started/install/
• Kubectl https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/install-kubectl/
• Node https://nodejs.org/en/download/ (we will use Typescript as language on Pulumi)

Start with Pulumi

Let's start with a gcp template

pulumi new gcp-typescript

Follow the steps in the cli for name of project, description, the stack and GCP project name

Pulumi will install all dependencies we need to handle GCP resources, but still we need Kubernetes modules, let's install.

npm install --save @pulumi/kubernetes @pulumi/kubernetesx

The index.ts file is the example to create a bucket, let's play with that to familiarize with Pulumi.
Run the command in our terminal:

pulumi up

Just run remove the test

pulumi destroy

Organize directory structure

Now we will to organize the directories to separate GCP resources and kubernetes resources.

Looks like this:

├── Pulumi.dev.yaml
├── Pulumi.yaml
├── gcp
│   └── gke
│       └── index.ts
├── index.ts
├── k8s
│   └── guestbook
│       ├── config.ts
│       ├── index.ts
│       ├── namespace.ts
│       └── redis.ts
├── package-lock.json
├── package.json
└── tsconfig.json

Configure the GKE Autopilot Cluster

The Autopilot we have the benefits of Google will handle our nodes, it's a fully managed Kubernetes cluster.
Of course there some trade-offs, for example you are not allowed to use Istio as service mesh, cert-manager and others that need mutatingwebhookconfigurations, you can check all features and limitations here: https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/concepts/autopilot-overview

First, we will setup variables on the file Pulumi.dev.yaml, the variable for the min gke kubernetes version in your case 1.19 (this is the stable version on the date of the article created).
Pay attention to the name infrastructure: this is must be the same name as your Pulumi project name in the file Pulumi.yaml

config:
  gcp:project: {REPLACE_FOR_YOUR_GCP_PROJECT}
  infrastructure:gke-min-version: '1.19'
  

So let's edit your gcp/gke/index.ts file

And the root index.ts

export * from './gcp/gke';

and run the command up

pulumi up

This process could take a few minutes to create a GKE cluster.

Configure the application

For the exemplification, we will use the guestbook application (in the next episodes we will adding more complex applications).

Configure variables:

As the same variable for gke-min-version for the cluster, we will create just one, the number of replicas for the application.

pulumi config -s dev set --path  guestbook.replicas 1

To simplify the process of write manifests files we will use the package pulumi/kubernetesx.
Remember the structure of directories, the files are on the k8s/guestbook

Change the file index.ts to add the entry for the application

export * from './gcp/gke';
export * from './k8s/guestbook';

And run up command:

pulumi up

The output response contains the IP to access the application.

To clean up just run the destroy command:

pulumi destroy

Conclusion

This is the first introduction of what we can able to do with Pulumi as infrastructure as code.
In the next episodes, we will explore more functionalities of Pulumi combine the pipeline on GitLab.

Here you can see a free and good Pulumi Crash Course on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCSt5XpbeUuRQ-CndGtYFL8w