This stage performs two important tasks:
- create the top-level hierarchy of folders, and the associated resources used later on to automate each part of the hierarchy (eg. Networking)
- set organization policies on the organization, and any exception required on specific folders
The code is intentionally simple, as it's intended to provide a generic initial setup (Networking, Security, etc.), and then allow easy customizations to complete the implementation of the intended hierarchy design.
The following diagram is a high level reference of the resources created and managed here:
Despite its simplicity, this stage implements the basics of a design that we've seen working well for a variety of customers, where the hierarchy is laid out following two conceptually different approaches:
- core or shared resources are grouped in hierarchy branches that map to their type or purpose (e.g. Networking)
- team or application resources are grouped in lower level hierarchy branches that map to management or operational considerations (e.g. which team manages a set of applications, or owns a subset of company data, etc.)
This split approach usually represents well functional and operational patterns, where core resources are centrally managed by individual teams (e.g. networking, security, fleets of similar VMS, etc.), while teams need more granularity to access managed services used by the applications they maintain.
The approach also adapts to different high level requirements:
- it can be used either for single organizations containing multiple environments, or with multiple organizations dedicated to specific environments (e.g. prod/nonprod), as the environment split is implemented at the project or lower folder level
- it adapts to complex scenarios, with different countries or corporate entities using the same GCP organization, as core services are typically shared, and/or an extra layer on top can be used as a drop-in to implement the country/entity separation
Additionally, a few critical benefits are directly provided by this design:
- core services are clearly separated, with very few touchpoints where IAM and security policies need to be applied (typically their top-level folder)
- adding a new set of core services (e.g. shared GKE clusters) is a trivial operation that does not break the existing design
- grouping application resources and services using teams or business logic is a flexible approach, which maps well to typical operational or budget requirements
- automation stages (e.g. Networking) can be segregated in a simple and effective way, by creating the required service accounts and buckets for each stage here, and applying a handful of IAM roles to the relevant folder
For a discussion on naming, please refer to the Bootstrap stage documentation, as the same approach is shared by all stages.
Fully multitenant hierarchies inside the same organization are implemented via separate additional stages that need to be run once for each tenant, and require this stage as a prerequisite.
This stage also implements optional support for CI/CD, much in the same way as the bootstrap stage. The only difference is on Workload Identity Federation, which is only configured in bootstrap and made available here via stage interface variables (the automatically generated .tfvars
files).
For details on how to configure CI/CD please refer to the relevant section in the bootstrap stage documentation.
This stage is meant to be executed after the bootstrap stage has run, as it leverages the automation service account and bucket created there. The relevant user groups must also exist, but that's one of the requirements for the previous stage too, so if you ran that successfully, you're good to go.
It's of course possible to run this stage in isolation, but that's outside the scope of this document, and you would need to refer to the code for the bootstrap stage for the actual roles needed.
Before running this stage, you need to make sure you have the correct credentials and permissions, and localize variables by assigning values that match your configuration.
As all other FAST stages, the mechanism used to pass variable values and pre-built provider files from one stage to the next is also leveraged here.
The commands to link or copy the provider and terraform variable files can be easily derived from the stage-links.sh
script in the FAST root folder, passing it a single argument with the local output files folder (if configured) or the GCS output bucket in the automation project (derived from stage 0 outputs). The following examples demonstrate both cases, and the resulting commands that then need to be copy/pasted and run.
../../stage-links.sh ~/fast-config
# copy and paste the following commands for '1-resman'
ln -s ~/fast-config/providers/1-resman-providers.tf ./
ln -s ~/fast-config/tfvars/globals.auto.tfvars.json ./
ln -s ~/fast-config/tfvars/0-bootstrap.auto.tfvars.json ./
../../stage-links.sh gs://xxx-prod-iac-core-outputs-0
# copy and paste the following commands for '1-resman'
gcloud alpha storage cp gs://xxx-prod-iac-core-outputs-0/providers/1-resman-providers.tf ./
gcloud alpha storage cp gs://xxx-prod-iac-core-outputs-0/tfvars/globals.auto.tfvars.json ./
gcloud alpha storage cp gs://xxx-prod-iac-core-outputs-0/tfvars/0-bootstrap.auto.tfvars.json ./
The preconfigured provider file uses impersonation to run with this stage's automation service account's credentials. The gcp-devops
and organization-admins
groups have the necessary IAM bindings in place to do that, so make sure the current user is a member of one of those groups.
Variables in this stage -- like most other FAST stages -- are broadly divided into three separate sets:
- variables which refer to global values for the whole organization (org id, billing account id, prefix, etc.), which are pre-populated via the
globals.auto.tfvars.json
file linked or copied above - variables which refer to resources managed by previous stage, which are prepopulated here via the
0-bootstrap.auto.tfvars.json
file linked or copied above - and finally variables that optionally control this stage's behaviour and customizations, and can to be set in a custom
terraform.tfvars
file
The latter set is explained in the Customization sections below, and the full list can be found in the Variables table at the bottom of this document.
Note that the outputs_location
variable is disabled by default, you need to explicitly set it in your terraform.tfvars
file if you want output files to be generated by this stage. This is a sample terraform.tfvars
that configures it, refer to the bootstrap stage documentation for more details:
outputs_location = "~/fast-config"
Once provider and variable values are in place and the correct user is configured, the stage can be run:
terraform init
terraform apply
This stage provides a single built-in customization that offers a minimal (but usable) implementation of the "application" or "business" grouping for resources discussed above. The team_folders
variable allows you to specify a map of team name and groups, that will result in folders, automation service accounts, and IAM policies applied.
Consider the following example in a tfvars
file:
team_folders = {
team-a = {
descriptive_name = "Team A"
group_iam = {
"team-a@gcp-pso-italy.net" = [
"roles/viewer"
]
}
impersonation_groups = ["team-a-admins@gcp-pso-italy.net"]
}
}
This will result in
- a "Team A" folder under the "Teams" folder
- one GCS bucket in the automation project
- one service account in the automation project with the correct IAM policies on the folder and bucket
- a IAM policy on the folder that assigns
roles/viewer
to theteam-a
group - a IAM policy on the service account that allows
team-a
to impersonate it
This allows to centralize the minimum set of resources to delegate control of each team's folder to a pipeline, and/or to the team group. This can be used as a starting point for scenarios that implement more complex requirements (e.g. environment folders per team, etc.).
Organization policies leverage -- with one exception -- the built-in factory implemented in the organization module, and configured via the yaml files in the data
folder. To edit organization policies, check and edit the files there.
The one exception is Domain Restricted Sharing, which is made dynamic and implemented in code so as to auto-add the current organization's customer id. The organization_policy_configs
variable allow to easily add ids from third party organizations if needed.
IAM roles can be easily edited in the relevant branch-xxx.tf
file, following the best practice outlined in the bootstrap stage documentation of separating user-level and service-account level IAM policies in modules' iam_groups
, iam
, and iam_additive
variables.
A full reference of IAM roles managed by this stage is available here.
Due to its simplicity, this stage lends itself easily to customizations: adding a new top-level branch (e.g. for shared GKE clusters) is as easy as cloning one of the branch-xxx.tf
files, and changing names.
name | description | modules | resources |
---|---|---|---|
billing.tf | Billing resources for external billing use cases. | google_billing_account_iam_member |
|
branch-data-platform.tf | Data Platform stages resources. | folder · gcs · iam-service-account |
google_organization_iam_member |
branch-gke.tf | GKE multitenant stage resources. | folder · gcs · iam-service-account |
|
branch-networking.tf | Networking stage resources. | folder · gcs · iam-service-account |
|
branch-project-factory.tf | Project factory stage resources. | gcs · iam-service-account |
google_organization_iam_member |
branch-sandbox.tf | Sandbox stage resources. | folder · gcs · iam-service-account |
|
branch-security.tf | Security stage resources. | folder · gcs · iam-service-account |
|
branch-teams.tf | Team stage resources. | folder · gcs · iam-service-account |
|
cicd-data-platform.tf | CI/CD resources for the data platform branch. | iam-service-account · source-repository |
|
cicd-gke.tf | CI/CD resources for the data platform branch. | iam-service-account · source-repository |
|
cicd-networking.tf | CI/CD resources for the networking branch. | iam-service-account · source-repository |
|
cicd-project-factory.tf | CI/CD resources for the teams branch. | iam-service-account · source-repository |
|
cicd-security.tf | CI/CD resources for the security branch. | iam-service-account · source-repository |
|
main.tf | Module-level locals and resources. | ||
organization.tf | Organization policies. | organization |
|
outputs-files.tf | Output files persistence to local filesystem. | local_file |
|
outputs-gcs.tf | Output files persistence to automation GCS bucket. | google_storage_bucket_object |
|
outputs.tf | Module outputs. | ||
variables.tf | Module variables. |
name | description | type | required | default | producer |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
automation | Automation resources created by the bootstrap stage. | object({…}) |
✓ | 0-bootstrap |
|
billing_account | Billing account id. If billing account is not part of the same org set is_org_level to false . To disable handling of billing IAM roles set no_iam to true . |
object({…}) |
✓ | 0-bootstrap |
|
organization | Organization details. | object({…}) |
✓ | 0-bootstrap |
|
prefix | Prefix used for resources that need unique names. Use 9 characters or less. | string |
✓ | 0-bootstrap |
|
cicd_repositories | CI/CD repository configuration. Identity providers reference keys in the automation.federated_identity_providers variable. Set to null to disable, or set individual repositories to null if not needed. |
object({…}) |
null |
||
custom_roles | Custom roles defined at the org level, in key => id format. | object({…}) |
null |
0-bootstrap |
|
data_dir | Relative path for the folder storing configuration data. | string |
"data" |
||
fast_features | Selective control for top-level FAST features. | object({…}) |
{} |
0-0-bootstrap |
|
groups | Group names to grant organization-level permissions. | object({…}) |
{} |
0-bootstrap |
|
locations | Optional locations for GCS, BigQuery, and logging buckets created here. | object({…}) |
{…} |
0-bootstrap |
|
organization_policy_configs | Organization policies customization. | object({…}) |
null |
||
outputs_location | Enable writing provider, tfvars and CI/CD workflow files to local filesystem. Leave null to disable. | string |
null |
||
tag_names | Customized names for resource management tags. | object({…}) |
{…} |
||
team_folders | Team folders to be created. Format is described in a code comment. | map(object({…})) |
null |
name | description | sensitive | consumers |
---|---|---|---|
cicd_repositories | WIF configuration for CI/CD repositories. | ||
dataplatform | Data for the Data Platform stage. | ||
gke_multitenant | Data for the GKE multitenant stage. | 03-gke-multitenant |
|
networking | Data for the networking stage. | ||
project_factories | Data for the project factories stage. | ||
providers | Terraform provider files for this stage and dependent stages. | ✓ | 02-networking · 02-security · 03-dataplatform · xx-sandbox · xx-teams |
sandbox | Data for the sandbox stage. | xx-sandbox |
|
security | Data for the networking stage. | 02-security |
|
teams | Data for the teams stage. | ||
tfvars | Terraform variable files for the following stages. | ✓ |