Orchestrate a GCP Cloud SQL instance

This blog post discusses how you can automate the creation of a Google® Cloud Platform (GCP) Cloud SQL instance by using Ansible® and Jenkins®. The blog also includes an example of spinning up a MySQL® Cloud SQL instance, version 5.7,
with an Ansible playbook.

Ansible and Jenkins let you spin up a GCP Cloud SQL instance quickly by accessing Cloud SQL with a project-specific GCP account. This option ensures additional security by providing access to the GCP console only to users with GCP admin access. You can write playbooks for different GCP services and roll out Jenkins jobs to users to spin up GCP infrastructure as needed.

Necessary tools

To perform this task, you need to use Ansible and Jenkins.

Ansible - Use this for configuration management and as an orchestration tool in DevOps. Ansible has a wide variety of prebuilt modules written in Python for different products in the market that you can customize by using Python.

Jenkins - You can use Jenkins as a continuous integration server or as an automation server. Based on Java®, Jenkins has a wide range of plug-ins for
different products. You can customize the plug-ins by using Java or Apache® Groovy.

Prerequisites

In this task, Ansible acts as an orchestration tool, and Jenkins acts as an automation server. Prerequisites for doing this task include the following items:

1. Install Jenkins and Ansible, accessible over the Internet, on the server.
2. Create a service account, assign a Cloud SQL Admin role to the service account, and download the key of the service account.
3. After you create the service account, enable the Cloud SQL Admin API for the project in which you created the service account. Find the URL here for enabling the service account by using the following syntax.
4. Use the following commands, as the `root` user, to install the required packages on the Ansible Server:

        yum install python-pip
        pip install apache-libcloud
        pip install google-auth

Set up the Ansible playbook
After completing the prerequisites, you need to move the Ansible playbook and service account key file to the Jenkins server.

Ansible playbook

An Ansible playbook contains a set of instructions written in YAML. This example uses a gcp\_sql\_instance module to spin up the Cloud SQL instance. The following playbook creates a GCP Cloud SQL instance of MySQL database version 5.7:

The playbook in this example uses the following playbook variables files and
stores them in vars.yml: 

-  project\_id: cloudsql-258106
-  authentification\_type: serviceaccount
-  credentials\_file: /ansible-play/cloudsql-auth.json
-  instance\_name: cloudsql-instance-mysql
-  db\_version: MYSQL\_5\_7
-  gcp\_region: us-central1
-  instance\_tier: db-n1-standard-1

Jenkins server

Jenkins is an automation server, and the job is a basic component in Jenkins that you use to define the task that you want to automate.

The job defines CloudSQL as the job name. 

Ansible plug-in in Jenkins 

To run the playbook in a Jenkins job, you must install the Ansible plug-in in Jenkins. Then use that plug-in in the Build step of the Jenkins job to specify the playbook as shown in the preceding screenshot

After the CloudSQL job runs, you should see output similar to the following output: 

Jenkins user interface 
The following screenshot shows the user interface (UI) in Jenkins that you use to run or make changes to the job. The screenshot shows the MySQL Cloud SQL instance created in GCP after Jenkins job completes:

Conclusion 

Use Jenkins and Ansible to implement Infrastructure as a Code (IaaC), which helps to avoid human errors during infrastructure spin up and restricts access to the GCP console to a limited set of users. Automating this task by using Ansible and Jenkins provides a GUI for authorized Jenkins users who don't know GCP or how to spin a Cloud SQL instance.