Accessing Terraform Remote State Data in GCP

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Accessing Terraform Remote State Data in GCP

You are a DevOps engineer working at an organization that is trying to move all its configuration management to Infrastructure as Code (IaC). There is some concern about this plan, since many teams work independently. You will meet with the networking team to set up an initial VPC using Terraform with a remote state backend that other teams can access. Next, you will meet with one of the application teams to configure Terraform to deploy their VMs into the VPC that the networking team has created and will manage. Once this is set up, the networking team can manage the VPC as they need to and the latest information will be available for the application teams via the Terraform remote state backend.

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Lab Info

Level

Intermediate

Last updated

Sep 09, 2025

Duration

45m

Challenge

Create a Network Using Terraform with a Remote State GCS Backend
- Create a bucket with a globally unique name to store state files in.
- Create a terraform directory in Cloud Shell to work in.
- Create a network directory containing a main.tf file.
- Create a terraform code block defining providers and setting up remote state to target the bucket.
- Create a google_compute_network resource.
- Create a google_compute_subnetwork resource.
- Create an output block defining the subnet's name.
- Execute terraform init.
- Execute terraform apply.
Challenge

Create a VM Deployed into the Network from Objective 1 Using the Remote State Data
- From your top-level terraform directory, create a vm directory containing a main.tf file.
- Create a terraform code block defining providers and setting up remote state to target the bucket.
- Create a terraform_remote_state data object targeting the remote state of the VPC.
- Create a google_compute_instance resource and set the network_interface.subnetwork value to the output from Objective 1.
- Execute terraform init.
- Execute terraform apply.

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