Overview

As we mentioned in Chapter 5, Managing Environments, one of the fundamental principles in modern application development is maintaining dev/prod parity (https://12factor.net/dev-prod-parity). That is, different environments, such as development, testing, and production environments, should be as similar as possible. Terraform is the ideal tool to set up any number of environments and then delete them once they’ve been used. To minimize the cost, it is a common practice to provision smaller instance sizes or zonal resources instead of larger and regional resources in development environments. As we have discussed previously, by combining modules and workspaces, we can use Terraform to provision equivalent environments quickly and with minimal repeated effort.

In this exercise, we want to deploy two GKE clusters, one for development and one for production. The two clusters should be nearly identical, except that we want to save costs for the development cluster. Thus...