Creating Infrastructure

This chapter will walk you through configuring your first Gyro project as well as creating and managing your first resource.

Setting up a Gyro Project

Before you can start managing cloud resources with Gyro you need to initialize a Gyro project. To initialize your Gyro we’ll use the gyro init command. This command takes a list of plugins to load and creates a the .gyro directory and the .gyro/init.gyro configuration file.

Since this tutorial will walk you through creating and managing a resource in AWS, we’ll initialize our project with the AWS provider plugin:

$ gyro init gyro:gyro-aws-provider:1.5.2
+ Creating a new .gyro directory
+ Writing to the .gyro/init.gyro file

Setting up Provider Authentication

Before we can create any resources we’ll need to configure Gyro so it knows how to authenticate to AWS to make API calls. Each cloud provider has a different mechanism for authentication. The AWS provider uses the same authentication mechanism that the AWS CLI uses, which is to provide access keys in the $HOME/.aws/credentials file.

Ensure you have credentials for AWS defined in $HOME/.aws/credentials. If you have the AWS CLI installed you can run the following to configure your credentials:

$ aws configure --profile gyro
AWS Access Key ID [None]: AEVOO9PAHC4THIE6UB3G
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: UvkNum4VB025EHVtBKQxzYcuOLSYNAF6e300yfVf
Default region name [us-east-1]:
Default output format [None]:
$

Verify the credentials:

$ grep -A3 gyro $HOME/.aws/credentials
[gyro]
aws_access_key_id = AEVOO9PAHC4THIE6UB3G
aws_secret_access_key = UvkNum4VB025EHVtBKQxzYcuOLSYNAF6e300yfVf

Now that we have the credentials file configured we need to tell Gyro which credentials we want to use. For this we use an @credentials directive in .gyro/init.gyro. Add the following to .gyro/init.gyro:

@credentials aws::credentials
    profile-name: "gyro"
    region: "us-east-1"
@end

Configure a Resource

Resources define cloud infrastructure configuration. For this example we’ll configure a single aws::instance resource.

Create a file named instance.gyro with the following resource configuration in it:

ami-id: $(external-query aws::ami {
    name: 'ubuntu/images/hvm-ssd/ubuntu-xenial-16.04-amd64-server-20190628',
    architecture: 'x86_64',
    root-device-type: 'ebs',
    virtualization-type: 'hvm',
    owner-id: '099720109477',
    state: 'available'
}).0.id

aws::instance webserver
    ami: $(ami-id)
    instance-type: "t3.nano"
end

This configuration demonstrates how to query for a resource, and how to create a new resource.

Using the $(external-query ...) resolver we can search for resources that are not managed by Gyro. In this case we’re looking up the ami-id for an Ubuntu Linux machine image. Each resource has a different set of parameters that it can filter by. The advantage to looking up the ami-id this way is that we’ll get the appropriate ami-id no matter what region we have configured in our credentials above.

We use the ami-id to create a single aws::instance. The only required setting is the instance-type which we’ll set to t3.nano.

Creating an Instance

Note

The following instructions will create a t3.nano instance which will incur charges on your AWS account.

Now that we have our configuration we can tell Gyro to apply it by using the gyro up command.

$ gyro up --no-verbose
↓ Loading plugin: gyro:gyro-aws-provider:1.5.2

Looking for changes...

+ Create aws::instance webserver

Are you sure you want to change resources? (y/N) y

+ Creating aws::instance webserver OK

The gyro up command will compare local state (of which there is none right none) with the configuration we just added and present you with the actions necessary to effect the changes in the configuration. By default Gyro will show the detailed view showing exactly which fields have changed. For a concise view use the --no-verbose option to only show the action (create, update, replace, delete) that will be taken for any resources that have changed.

$ gyro up
↓ Loading plugin: gyro:gyro-aws-provider:1.5.2

Looking for changes...

+ Create aws::instance webserver
· ami: aws::ami id=ami-0cfee17793b08a293
· instance-type: 't3.nano'

Are you sure you want to change resources? (y/N) y

+ Creating aws::instance webserver OK

We now have t3.nano instance running in our AWS account. At this point if we run gyro up again it shouldn’t find any changes.

$ gyro up
↓ Loading plugin: gyro:gyro-aws-provider:1.5.2
⟳ Refreshed resources: 1

Looking for changes...

No changes.

In the next section will show you how Gyro makes changes to infrastructure easy and safe.