Getting Started - GCP
Last updated
Last updated
You'll provision infrastructure that ultimately looks as follows:
This includes:
Cloud Functions
Service Accounts
Secret Manager Secrets, to hold pseudonymization salt, encryption keys, and data source API keys
Cloud Storage Buckets (GCS), if using psoxy to sanitize bulk file data, such as CSVs
NOTE: if you're connecting to Google Workspace as a data source, you'll also need to provision Service Account Keys and activate Google Workspace APIs.
a Google Project
we recommend a dedicated GCP project for your deployment, to provide an implicit security boundary around your infrastructure as well as simplify monitoring/cleanup
a GCP (Google) user or Service Account with permissions to provision Service Accounts, Secrets, Storage Buckets, Cloud Functions, and enable APIs within that project. eg:
additional APIs enabled in the project: (using the Service Usage API above, our Terraform will attempt to enable these, but as there is sometimes a few minutes delay in activation and in some cases they are required to read your existing infra prior to apply, you may experience errors. To pre-empt those, we suggest ensuring the following are enabled:
You'll also need a secure backend location for your Terraform state (such as a GCS or S3 bucket). It need not be in the same host platform/project/account to which you are deploying the proxy, as long as the Google/AWS user you are authenticated as when running Terraform has permissions to access it.
Some options:
GCS : https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/settings/backends/gcs
S3 : https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/settings/backends/s3
Alternatively, you may use a local file system, but this is not recommended for production use - as your Terraform state may contain secrets such as API keys, depending on the sources you connect.
See: https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/settings/backends/local
The https://github.com/Worklytics/psoxy-example-gcp repo provides an example configuration for hosting proxy instances in GCP. You use that template, following it's Usage docs to get started.
the 'Service Account' approach described in the prerequisites is preferable to giving a Google user account IAM roles to administer your infrastructure directly. You can pass this Service Account's email address to Terraform by setting the gcp_terraform_sa_account_email. Your machine/environments CLI must be authenticated as GCP entity which can impersonate this Service Account, and likely create tokens as it (Service Account Token Creator role).
using a dedicated GCP project is superior to using a shared project, as it provides an implicit security boundary around your infrastructure as well as simplifying monitoring/cleanup. The IAM roles specified in the prerequisites must be granted at the project level, so any non-Proxy infrastructure within the GCP project that hosts your proxy instances will be accessible to the user / service account who's managing the proxy infrastructure.
- proxy instances are deployed as GCP cloud functions
- processing of bulk data (such as HRIS exports) uses GCS buckets
- create custom roles for the proxy, to follow principle of least privilege
- your API keys and pseudonymization salt is stored in Secret Manager
- admin Service Accounts that personify Cloud Functions or are used as Google Workspace API connections
- you will need to enable various GCP APIs
the following APIs enabled in the project: (via )
(iamcredentials.googleapis.com) - generally needed to support authenticating Terraform. May not be needed if you're running terraform within a GCP environment.
(serviceusage.googleapis.com)
(compute.googleapis.com)
(cloudbuild.googleapis.com)
(cloudfunctions.googleapis.com)
(cloudresourcemanager.googleapis.com)
(iam.googleapis.com)
(secretmanager.googleapis.com)
(storage-api.googleapis.com)
For some help in bootstraping a GCP environment, see also:
The module is a dependency-free module that provides lists of GCP roles, etc needed for bootstraping a GCP project in which your proxy instances will reside.
