Environments

One of the the key drivers for the creation and adoption of Architect is the desire to offer self-service to developers. One of the elements of self-service in cloud app development is the ability to create your own cloud environments. Architect Datacenters offer just the feature needed to offer this ability while still ensuring that environments behave as desired.

Inside the datacenter file, operators can declare modules that will be invoked once for every environment the datacenter powers. This is perfect for the creation of namespaces, DNS zones, and more:

environment {
  module "namespace" {
    build = "./k8s-namespace"
    inputs = {
      name = environment.name
      kubeconfig = module.k8s.kubeconfig
    }
  }
}

As you may have noticed from the template above, the module invocation includes a dynamic reference to the environment name that allows the module to include environment-specific information.

In addition to the environment name, modules also have access to the full array of application nodes that will be deployed to the environment. This metadata can be used to inject environment data into applications, or include clever conditions that limit when modules should be invoked. The code below uses the when clause to limit the creation of a postgres cluster and nginx controller only to environments that include a database and ingress node respectively:

environment {
  module "postgresCluster" {
    when = contains(environment.nodes.*.type, "database") && contains(environment.nodes.*.inputs.databaseType, "postgres")
    build = "./databaseCluster"
    inputs = {
      name = "${datacenter.name}-database"
      databaseType = "pg"
      databaseVersion = 15
      region = variable.region
      vpcId = module.vpc.id
      "digitalocean:token" = variable.do_token
    }
  }

  module "nginxController" {
    when = contains(environment.nodes.*.type, "ingress")
    build = "./nginx-controller"
    inputs = {
      name = "${datacenter.name}-nginx-controller"
      kubeconfig = module.k8s.kubeconfig
    }
  }
}