Cloud Infrastructure & IaC — OpenTofu on GCP
Reproducible cloud environments defined entirely as code: VMs, networking and firewall policy on Google Cloud, applied and destroyed on demand.
- 100%
- of lab infrastructure reproducible from code
- 3
- cloud platforms worked with (GCP, AWS, Azure)
- min
- environment spin-up/tear-down time
Problemet
Manually provisioned cloud environments drift, can't be reviewed and can't be reproduced. Lab and project infrastructure needed to be spun up identically, torn down cheaply and version-controlled like application code.
Lösningen
Implemented Infrastructure as Code with OpenTofu (the open-source Terraform fork) on Google Cloud Platform: declarative definitions for compute instances, VPC networks, subnets and firewall rules, with state management and plan/apply workflows. The same approach carries into my production work — this portfolio itself ships as Docker Compose infrastructure with Nginx, SSL automation and scripted backups on a VPS.
Arkitektur
- Declarative VM provisioning on GCP: machine types, images, startup scripts and SSH key injection defined in HCL.
- VPC design: custom networks and subnets, least-privilege firewall rules as code.
- Plan → review → apply workflow; state as the single source of truth; idempotent re-runs.
- Complementary AWS experience: EC2 compute, S3 storage, Lambda functions (AWS Academy Cloud Foundations).
- Kubernetes and Docker for workload orchestration; container-first deployment mindset.
- Production VPS operations: Docker Compose stacks, Nginx reverse proxy, Let's Encrypt automation, cron-driven encrypted backups.
Nyckelfunktioner
Everything as code
No console clicking — compute, network and firewall live in version control.
Disposable environments
Full environments created and destroyed in minutes, keeping cloud spend near zero.
Multi-cloud literacy
GCP (primary), AWS EC2/S3/Lambda, Azure fundamentals.
Container orchestration
Docker images, Compose stacks and Kubernetes deployments.
Teknikstack
Lärdomar
- State is the hard part of IaC — understanding what OpenTofu tracks (and what it doesn't) prevents most real-world incidents.
- Firewall rules as code force you to actually think about least privilege instead of clicking 'allow all'.
- The IaC mindset transfers everywhere: my VPS deployments are now fully scripted for the same reason my labs are.