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Building Flexible Network Templates in GCP with Terraform

You are a DevOps engineer at an organization that is moving their configuration management to Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform. The networking team wants to move to managing their GCP VPCs and subnets with Terraform, but is concerned that maintaining separate code bases for development and production networks would lead to the environments not having the same configurations. You will create a single Terraform module and build both production and development VPCs using that module. This way, the environments will remain mirrored, and managing changes will be transparent and auditable.

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Path Info

Level
Clock icon Advanced
Duration
Clock icon 1h 0m
Last updated
Clock icon Aug 30, 2025

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Table of Contents

  1. Challenge

    Create a 'networking' Module and Use It to Create a Small Development VPC

    • Create a terraform directory to work in.
    • Create a modules/networking directory, and create a main.tf inside of it.
    • Define variables for environment, cidr_range, regions and subnet_size.
    • Create a locals block and use the split(), element(), length(), and tonumber() Terraform functions to calculate the newbits value for the cidrsubnet() function argument.
    • Create a google_compute_network resource.
    • Create a google_compute_subnetwork resource. Use the count argument to create a subnet in each region in the regions variable. Use the cidrsubnet() function to calculate the ip_cidr_range based on the cidr_range variable.
    • In the terraform directory, create a dev folder containing a main.tf file.
    • Create a terraform block and a module referencing the modules/networking code. Set the environment to dev, the cidr_range to 10.10.0.0/24, regions to ["us-central1", "us-east1"], and subnet_size to 28.
    • Execute terraform init.
    • Execute terraform apply.

  2. Challenge

    Using the Same Module, Create a Production VPC with a Larger CIDR Block and More Subnets

    • In the terraform directory, create a prod folder containing a main.tf file.
    • Create a terraform block and a module referencing the modules/networking code. Set the environment to prod, the cidr_range to 10.0.0.0/8, regions to ["us-central1", "us-east1", "us-east4", "us-west1"], and subnet_size to 24.
    • Execute terraform init.
    • Execute terraform apply.
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