Containerize on Google Cloud – Building Solutions with GKE

In the previous chapter, we built and automated our solution on Google Cloud by utilizing Google Compute Engine (GCE). We built virtual machine (VM) images with Packer and provisioned our VM using Terraform. In this chapter, we’ll follow a similar path, but instead of working with VMs, we’ll look at hosting our application in containers within a Kubernetes cluster.

To achieve this, we’ll need to alter our approach by ditching Packer and replacing it with Docker to create a deployable artifact for our application. Once again, we’ll be using the google provider for Terraform and revisiting the kubernetes provider for Terraform that we looked at when we took the same step while on our journey with AWS and Azure.

Since the overwhelming majority of this remains the same when we move to Google Cloud, we won’t revisit these topics at the same length in this chapter. However, I would...