Installing Agones on Google Kubernetes Engine using Terraform

You can use Terraform to provision a GKE cluster and install Agones on it.

Before you begin

Take the following steps to enable the Kubernetes Engine API:

  1. Visit the Kubernetes Engine page in the Google Cloud Platform Console.
  2. Create or select a project.
  3. Wait for the API and related services to be enabled. This can take several minutes.
  4. Enable billing for your project.
  • If you are not an existing GCP user, you may be able to enroll for a $300 US Free Trial credit.

Choosing a shell

To complete this quickstart, we can use either Google Cloud Shell or a local shell.

Google Cloud Shell is a shell environment for managing resources hosted on Google Cloud Platform (GCP). Cloud Shell comes preinstalled with the gcloud and kubectl command-line tools. gcloud provides the primary command-line interface for GCP, and kubectl provides the command-line interface for running commands against Kubernetes clusters.

If you prefer using your local shell, you must install the gcloud and kubectl command-line tools in your environment.

Cloud shell

To launch Cloud Shell, perform the following steps:

  1. Go to Google Cloud Platform Console
  2. From the top-right corner of the console, click the Activate Google Cloud Shell button: cloud shell
  3. A Cloud Shell session opens inside a frame at the bottom of the console. Use this shell to run gcloud and kubectl commands.
  4. Set a compute zone in your geographical region with the following command. The compute zone will be something like us-west1-a. A full list can be found here.
    gcloud config set compute/zone [COMPUTE_ZONE]
    

Local shell

To install gcloud and kubectl, perform the following steps:

  1. Install the Google Cloud SDK, which includes the gcloud command-line tool.
  2. Initialize some default configuration by running the following command.
    • When asked Do you want to configure a default Compute Region and Zone? (Y/n)?, enter Y and choose a zone in your geographical region of choice.
    gcloud init
    
  3. Install the kubectl command-line tool by running the following command:
    gcloud components install kubectl
    

Installation

An example configuration can be found here: Terraform configuration with Agones submodule .

Copy this file into a local directory where you will execute the terraform commands.

The GKE cluster created from the example configuration will contain 3 Node Pools:

  • "default" node pool with "game-server" tag, containing 4 nodes.
  • "agones-system" node pool for Agones Controller.
  • "agones-metrics" for monitoring and metrics collecting purpose.

Configurable parameters:

  • project - your Google Cloud Project ID (required)
  • name - the name of the GKE cluster (default is “agones-terraform-example”)
  • agones_version - the version of agones to install (an empty string, which is the default, is the latest version from the Helm repository)
  • machine_type - machine type for hosting game servers (default is “e2-standard-4”)
  • node_count - count of game server nodes for the default node pool (default is “4”)
  • zone - the name of the zone you want your cluster to be created in (default is “us-west1-c”)
  • network - the name of the VPC network you want your cluster and firewall rules to be connected to (default is “default”)
  • subnetwork - the name of the subnetwork in which the cluster’s instances are launched. (required when using non default network)
  • log_level - possible values: Fatal, Error, Warn, Info, Debug (default is “info”)
  • feature_gates - a list of alpha and beta version features to enable. For example, “PlayerTracking=true&ContainerPortAllocation=true”
  • gameserver_minPort - the lower bound of the port range which gameservers will listen on (default is “7000”)
  • gameserver_maxPort - the upper bound of the port range which gameservers will listen on (default is “8000”)
  • gameserver_namespaces - a list of namespaces which will be used to run gameservers (default is ["default"]). For example ["default", "xbox-gameservers", "mobile-gameservers"]
  • force_update - whether or not to force the replacement/update of resource (default is true, false may be required to prevent immutability errors when updating the configuration)

Creating the cluster

In the directory where you created module.tf, run:

terraform init

This will cause terraform to clone the Agones repository and use the ./install/terraform folder as a starting point of Agones submodule, which contains all necessary Terraform configuration files.

Next, make sure that you can authenticate using gcloud:

gcloud auth application-default login

Option 1: Creating the cluster in the default VPC

To create your GKE cluster in the default VPC just specify the project variable.

terraform apply -var project="<YOUR_GCP_ProjectID>"

Option 2: Creating the cluster in a custom VPC

To create the cluster in a custom VPC you must specify the project, network and subnetwork variables.

terraform apply -var project="<YOUR_GCP_ProjectID>" -var network="<YOUR_NETWORK_NAME>" -var subnetwork="<YOUR_SUBNETWORK_NAME>"

To verify that the cluster was created successfully, set up your kubectl credentials:

gcloud container clusters get-credentials --zone us-west1-c agones-terraform-example

Then check that you have access to the Kubernetes cluster:

kubectl get nodes

You should have 6 nodes in Ready state.

Uninstall the Agones and delete GKE cluster

To delete all resources provisioned by Terraform:

terraform destroy -var project="<YOUR_GCP_ProjectID>"

Next Steps


Last modified June 23, 2021: add copy to clipboard function to code on website (#2149) (b0c87b21a)