hands-on lab

Working with Terraform Configuration Variables in GCP

Difficulty: Beginner
Duration: Up to 45 minutes
Students: 339
Rating: 4.6/5
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Description

Configuring variables is a critical component of developing infrastructure with Terraform. Variables allow for dynamic deployments and enable developers the ability to reuse patterns in their infrastructure. Variables can be passed in at the start of the deployment, configured alongside the cloud resources, or returned to the user after a successful deployment.

By incorporating variables into your deployments, you eliminate the need to hard-code specific configurations, which improves code maintainability and troubleshooting. Your Terraform infrastructure can then be shared with others so they can implement the same solution using their unique resource configurations that fit their needs.

In this lab, you will learn how to refactor Terraform resource definitions to allow for code reuse with variables.

Learning Objectives

Upon completion of this lab, you will be able to:

  • Configure and utilize variables in your Terraform deployments
  • Define output variables in Terraform

Intended Audience

  • Individuals looking to pass the HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate Exam
  • Individuals and teams seeking an introduction to using Terraform with Google Cloud Platform

Prerequisites

Familiarity with the following will be beneficial but is not required:

  • Basic concepts of Google Cloud Platform

Updates

July 8th, 2024 - Updated instance image

April 27th, 2023 - Updated theia to enable autosave

Environment before

Environment after

Covered topics

Lab steps

Activating the Google Cloud Platform Service Account
Declaring Terraform Variables and Setting Values Using the Command Line
Leveraging Terraform Variable Configuration Files