Hi GDM, Bye GDM

• Gaps in GDM
• Progress with ILB
• The Rumor (& the probable reality)

Gaps in GDM

I first encountered issues with Google Deployment Manager, when I was required to deploy HTTP Internal Load Balancer aka ILB using it. To beign with there was no example of it all over the internet. There were none in Google’s deployment manager samples or cloud foundation toolkit. In this situation, I did what anyone would do; asked “why and how” in the forums. And, a significant percent of replies I got were in the line of “use Terraform instead”!!!!

Progress with ILB

I ignored the Terraform push and succesfully built a yaml only GDM deployment descriptor with help from some fellow engineer’s on stackoverflow and GCP documentation. The next road block came when I tried to update an ILB using GDM. From the error it was clear that it’s a bug in GDM.

The Rumor (& the probable reality)

I was told that Google has put GDM in the backburner, and promoting Terraform as the preferred path forward. This was “kinda” confirmed by our GCP partner when I presented them with the ILB issue. This me quoting someone quoting someone else, so don’t hold me to this. But here is what I got:

Deployment Manager is currently in a maintenance mode and is not recommended for new deployments. DM lacks support for some newer APIs including regionUrlMap.

So, Terraform, here I come. I need to migrate all our GDM IaC stuff to Terraform. May be I’ll write about the migration process in the near future.

• Using Terraform with GCP