A set of Terraform modules that will deploy a fully-instrumented microservices stack using AWS and New Relic.

1. A New Relic account and License Key
2. An AWS account
3. Terraform installed

1. begin by cloning this repository

2. cd into the terraform directory

3. make a copy of the file terraform.tfvars.sample and rename it terraform.tfvars

4. Open the file and edit the variables for your own configuration and deployment.

   Notes: The Terraform module uses the AWS resource provider) to create AWS resources on your behalf. In order to do this, it must be configured properly with credentials, region, etc. There are several ways you can do this - using environment variables, or if you have installed the AWS cli, the Terraform provider will use the credentials stored in you home dir, as well as several other methods. Configuring the module is out of the scope of this doc. Recommend reading the link above to use the method that works best for you.

   Similarly, your New Relic license key is used in several places and is provided as a standard Terraform variable. You may set it in the .tfvars file for convenience, or you can use any of the standard methods for setting and overriding variables according to the Terraform docs

5. run terraform init

6. When you are ready to deploy run terraform apply. Terraform will provide a list of all of the resources its going to create and will prompt you for confirmation

   Notes: This is going to create a 3-node Kubernetes cluster in EKS, and ALB, a VPC, and all of the necessary supporting resources (roles, auto-scaling groups, etc). All resources will be tagged with project=<your cluster name> and owner=<owner> that you provided in the configuration, should you need to identify them outside of Terraform

   The default limit for the number of VPCs in each region per AWS account is usually in the single digits. If you are using a shared account, it's possible that you may run into this limit. In that case, recommend choosing another region, or requesting a quota increase.

7. After 20-30 minutes, your cluster should be completely deployed. Terraform will display the output from the module, which will include the hostname of the loadbalancer as well as the path to the kubeconfig file it created, should you want to interface with the cluster directly via kubectl, etc. At any time you can run terraform output from this directory to view those values. Note that Terraform will have created a terraform.tfstate file. This is how Terraform keeps track of what it has deployed. Don't delete this file, otherwise Terraform will not be able to clean up when you are done!

8. One of the outputs is a link to a workload containing all of the entities created by this configuration. A handy shortcut to started

9. You can visit the loadbalancer host in a browser and you should be directed to the OpenApi/Swagger documentation for the Api.

10. Visit New Relic One to see the mircroservices working together, complete with Kubernetes Cluster Explorer, Distributed Tracing, and Logs-in-context. One of the outputs is a link to a workload containing all of the entities created by this configuration. A handy shortcut to started exploring its observability.

    Alternatively, you can use the global filter in New Relic Explorer to filter for project = <whatever your cluster name is>

11. Run terraform destroy when you are done, and all created resources will be removed.