Lab Deployment (AWS)

Warning

If you are working on the GCP lab, skip this page and proceed to Terraform Background.

In this activity you will:

  • Create AWS environment variables
  • Create an SSH key-pair
  • Create the Terraform variables
  • Initialize the AWS Terraform provider
  • Deploy the lab infrastucture plan
  • Confirm firewall bootstrap completion

Create AWS environment variables

We will be deploying the lab infrastucture in AWS using Terraform. A predefined Terraform plan is provided that will initialize the AWS provider and call modules responsible for instantiating the network, compute, and storage resources needed.

In order for Terraform to do this it will need to authenticate to AWS using the AWS Access Key and Secret Key values that were presented in the Qwiklabs panel when the lab was started. Rather than write these as Terraform variables, we will use Linux environment variables.

Create the environment variables.

$ export AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID="your-access-key-here"
$ export AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY="your-secret-key-here"

Create an SSH key-pair

All AWS EC2 instances are required to have an SSH key-pair defined when the instance is created. This is done to ensure secure access to the instance will be available once it is created.

Create an SSH key-pair with an empty passphrase and save them in the ~/.ssh directory.

$ ssh-keygen -t rsa -b 1024 -N '' -f ~/.ssh/lab_ssh_key

Create the Terraform variables

Change into the AWS deployment directory.

$ cd ~/multicloud-automation-lab/deployment/aws

In this directory you will find the three main files associated with a Terraform plan: main.tf, variables.tf, and outputs.tf. View the contents of these files to see what they contain and how they’re structured.

$ more main.tf
$ more variables.tf
$ more outputs.tf

The file main.tf defines the providers that will be used and the resources that will be created (more on that shortly). Since it is poor practice to hard code values into the plan, the file variables.tf will be used to declare the variables that will be used in the plan (but not necessarily their values). The outputs.tf file will define the values to display that result from applying the plan.

Create a file called terraform.tfvars in the current directory that contains the following variables and their values. Fill in the quotes with the AWS region name, the AWS availability zone, and the path to your SSH public key file.

aws_region_name     = "<SEE_INSTRUCTOR_PRESENTATION>"
aws_az_name         = "<SEE_INSTRUCTOR_PRESENTATION>"
public_key_file     = "~/.ssh/lab_ssh_key.pub"

Initialize the AWS Terraform provider

Once you’ve created the terraform.tfvars file and populated it with the variables and values you are now ready to initialize the Terraform providers. For this initial deployment we will only be using the AWS Provider. This initialization process will download all the software, modules, and plugins needed for working in a particular environment.

$ terraform init

Deploy the lab infrastucture plan

We are now ready to deploy our lab infrastructure plan. We should first perform a dry-run of the deployment process and validate the contents of the plan files and module dependencies.

$ terraform plan

If there are no errors and the plan output looks good, let’s go ahead and perform the deployment.

$ terraform apply -auto-approve

At a high level these are each of the steps this plan will perform:

  1. Run the bootstrap module
    1. Create an S3 bucket for the firewall bootstrap package
    2. Assign an IAM policy to the bucket allowing read access from the firewall instance
    3. Create the /config/init-cfg.txt, /config/bootstrap.xml, /software, /content, and /license objects in the bootstrap bucket
  2. Run the vpc module
    1. Create the VPC
    2. Create the Internet gateway
    3. Create the management, untrust, web, and database subnets
    4. Create the security groups for each subnet
    5. Create the default route for the web and database subnets
  3. Run the firewall module
    1. Create the VM-Series firewall instance
    2. Create the VM-Series firewall interfaces
    3. Create the Elastic IPs for the management and untrust interfaces
    4. Create an IAM instance profile for accessing the bootstrap bucket
  4. Run the web module
    1. Create the web server instance
    2. Create the web server interface
  5. Run the database module
    1. Create the database server instance
    2. Create the database server interface

The deployment process should finish in a few minutes and you will be presented with the public IP addresses of the VM-Series firewall management and untrust interfaces. However, the VM-Series firewall can take up to ten minutes to complete the initial bootstrap process.

It is recommended that you skip ahead and read the Terraform Background section while you wait.

Confirm firewall bootstrap completion

SSH into the firewall with the following credentials.

  • Username: admin
  • Password: Ignite2019!
$ ssh admin@<FIREWALL_MGMT_IP>

Replace <FIREWALL_MGMT_IP> with the IP address of the firewall management interface that was provided in the Terraform plan results. This information can be easily recalled using the terraform output command within the deployment directory.

Warning

If you are unsuccessful the firewall instance is likely still bootstrapping or performing an autocommit. Hit Ctrl-C and try again after waiting a few minutes. The bootstrap process can take up to ten minutes to complete before you are able to successfully log in.

Once you have logged into the firewall you can check to ensure the management plane has completed its initialization.

admin@lab-fw> show chassis-ready

If the response is yes, you are ready to proceed with the configuration activities.

Note

While it is a security best practice to use SSH keys to authenticate to VM instances in the cloud, we have defined a static password for the firewall’s admin account in this lab (specifically, in the bootstrap package). This is because the PAN-OS XML API cannot utilize SSH keys and requires a username/password or API key for authentication.