infrastructure-as-code.md

copyright	lastupdated
years 2017, 2018	2018-01-10

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Automate deployment of environments using Infrastructure as Code

IBM Cloud Schematics is a tool that uses Terraform to provision and manage infrastructure resources, Cloud Foundry applications, services, Kubernetes clusters and much more using code in a configuration file(s).

In this tutorial, you will use a provided template in Schematics to provision a Linux virtual server, with Apache web server, MySQL, and PHP server (LAMP stack). You will then configure the template to add an Object Storage service and scale the resources to tune the environment (memory, CPU and disk size). Finish by deleting all of the resources created by the configuration.

Objectives

• Create environment using the LAMP template
• Create custom configuration from template
• Create environment from the configuration
• Scale resources
• Delete the environment

1. Create or use an existing Terraform configuration to describe the environment and store it in GitHub.
2. IBM Cloud Schematics reads configuration and creates the environment with LAMP stack and Cloud Object Storage service.

Products

{: #products}

• IBM Cloud Schematics
• IBM Cloud Infrastructure
• Object Storage

Before you begin

{: #prereqs}

Contact your Infrastructure master user to get the following permissions:

• Network (to add Public and Private Network Uplink)
• API Key

Create environment using the LAMP template

{: #lamptemplate}

In this section, you will learn the basics of a Terraform configuration by using a sample template configuration provided by Schematics. The LAMP template is used to provision a virtual machine instance and install Apache, MySQL (mariadb), and PHP onto that instance.

1. From https://console.bluemix.net, use the left side menu option and select Schematics.
2. Under the Templates section, find the LAMP template and click View Details to learn more.
3. Click Create Environment to create an environment using this template.
4. Fill in the required values in the Variables section:

• Add your Infrastructure (SoftLayer) username to softlayer_username
• Add your Infrastructure (SoftLayer) API key to softlayer_api_key. Retrieve your API key
• For ssh_notes variable, Add a description to assign to the SSH key.
• For tags variable,Add descriptive tags to label.
• Add your public SSH key to access the VM - To copy the public key to your clipboard, you can run the pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub command in your terminal.

5. Click Create to create the LAMP environment described in this template.
6. Click Plan and then Apply deploy the environment.
7. Once the apply process is completed, you should then see the status changing to Active. This may take few minutes. To verify the server configuration, head over to the infrastructure section to see the server created as per the template code.

Create custom configuration from template

{: #modifytemplate}

In this section, you will modify the code in the LAMP template to create your own custom configuration. You will modify the code to add an Object Storage service to the configuration and create a new environment.

1. Fork the LAMP template code used above: https://github.com/Cloud-Schematics/LAMP
2. Clone your fork locally: git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USER_NAME/LAMP
3. Inspect the configuration files
   • install.yml - contains installing script, this is where you can add all scripts related to your server install. See phpinfo() injected.
   • provider.tf - variables related to the provider where provider username and api key needed.
   • vm.tf - server configuration file to deploy the VM with specified variables.
4. Create a new file called object-storage.tf and add the code below:

   resource "ibm_object_storage_account" "lamp_storage" {
     count = "${var.object_storage_enabled}"
   }
   
   variable "object_storage_enabled" {
       default = 1
   }
   

   Note the label "lamp_storage", we will later look for that in the logs to make sure Object Storage service getting created.
5. Save the object-storage.tf file and push your changes to your forked repo.

   git add object-storage.tf
   git commit -m "Added object storage"
   git push origin master
   

Create an environment from the configuration

{: #create_custom_environment}

In this section, you will create a new environment with your custom configuration.

1. Go to https://console.bluemix.net, select the Schematics tab on the left side menu.
2. Click on the Environments tab and then click on the Create Environment button to create an Environment.
3. Enter your forked GitHub repo URL to Source Control URL
4. Enter "My custom LAMP environment" in Environment Name
5. Fill in the required values in the Variables section:
   • Add your Infrastructure (SoftLayer) username to softlayer_username
   • Add your Infrastructure (SoftLayer) API key to softlayer_api_key. Retrieve your API key
   • Add a description to assign to the SSH key to ssh_notes.
   • Add descriptive tags to label to tags.
   • Add your public SSH key to access the VM - To copy the public key to your clipboard, you can run the pbcopy < ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub command in your terminal.
6. Click Create, Plan and then Apply to create your new environment.
7. Once the process is completed successfully, you should then see the status changing to Active. This may take few minutes.
8. Click on the View Log button to view the logs. You should see Object Storage created.

Verify VM and Object Storage

{: #verifyvm}

In this section, we are going to verify the VM and Object Storage created successfully.

Verify VM

1. Using the left side menu, click on Infrastructure to view the list of virtual server devices.
2. Click Devices -> Device List to find the server created. You should see your server device listed.
3. Click on the server to view more information on the server configuration. Looking at the screenshot below, we can see that the server is successfully created.
4. Next, let's test the server in the web browser. Open the server public IP address in the web browser. You should see the server default installation page like below.

Verify Object Storage

1. From the Infrastructure section, click on the Object Storage button. You should see object storage service created.
2. Click on the Object Storage name to view the full list of regions Object Storage is available on.
3. Object Storage is available from different regions, click on Dallas 5 to get to the dashboard.
4. Click on View Credentials to view your Object Storage credentials and API end points.

More info on IBM Object Storage can be found here.

Scale resources using configuration

{: #scaleresources}

In this section, we are going to look at how to scale the virtual server resource. Our configuration contains variables with default values that are editable in Schematics. We are going to override the default value of the variables to accomplish the following:

• Increase number of CPU cores to 4 cores
• Increase RAM to 4GB
• Increase disk size to 100GB

1. From the IBM Cloud dashboard, navigate to Schematics -> Environments -> My custom LAMP environment -> Variables.
2. Under the variables section, update the variables memory to 4096, disk_size to 100, and cores to 4 and click Save.
3. Under the Detail section click Plan and Apply.
4. You should see in the logs that your changes applied successfully.

Delete environments and resources

{: #deleteresources}

You can delete environments by using the options menu. Delete both My LAMP environment and My custom LAMP environment when you are done.

Related information

IBM Object Storage

IBM Cloud Provider

IBM Cloud Schematics

Accelerate delivery of static files using a CDN - Object Storage