Referencing existing data using data sources

Note

The code for this section is under chap03/data-source in the GitHub repo of this book.

We discussed earlier that you should not mix provisioning resources through Terraform and the Google Cloud console, as this can lead to configuration drift. However, there are cases when you want to use information from data that Google Cloud provides or cloud resources that are created outside of your configuration file or out of your control. Terraform provides data sources, which you can read more about here: https://www.terraform.io/language/data-sources.

If you look at the Google Terraform documentation, available here at https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs, you’ll see a list of Google Cloud services that you can provision using Terraform. Under each service, you generally find a resources and a data sources subsection. Resources let you provision and manage Google Cloud resources, whereas data...