Multiple availability zones with terraform on AWS

Question

The VPC I'm working on has 3 logical tiers: Web, App and DB. For each tier there is one subnet in each availability zone. Total of 6 subnets in the region I'm using.

I'm trying to create EC2 instances using a module and the count parameter but I don't know how to tell terraform to use the two subnets of the App tier. An additional constraint I have is to use static IP addresses (or a way to have a deterministic private name)

I'm playing around with the resource

resource "aws_instance" "app_server" {
  ...
  count = "${var.app_servers_count}"

  # Not all at the same time, though!
  availability_zone = ...
  subnet_id = ...
  private_ip = ...
}

Things I've tried/thought so far:

• Use data "aws_subnet" "all_app_subnets" {...}, filter by name, get all the subnets that match and use them as a list. But aws_subnet cannot return a list;
• Use data "aws_availability_zones" {...} to find all the zones. But I still have the problem of assigning the correct subnet;
• Use data "aws_subnet_ids" {...} which looks like the best option. But apparently it doesn't have a filter option to match the networks namel
• Pass the subnets IDs as list of strings to the module. But I don't want to hard code the IDs, it's not automation;
• Hard code the subnets as data "aws_subnet" "app_subnet_1" {...}, data "aws_subnet" "app_subnet_2" {...} but then I have to use separate sets of variables for each subnet which I don't like;
• Get information for each subnet like in the point above but then create a map to access it as a list. But it's not possibile to use interpolation in variables definition;
• Not using modules and hard-code each instance for each environment. Mmmm... really?

I really ran out of ideas. It seems that nobody has to deploy instances in specific subnetworks and keep a good degree of abstration. I see only examples where subnetworks are not specified or where people just use default values for everything. Is this really something so unusual?

Thanks in advance to everyone.

Answer 1

It is possible to evenly distribute instances across multiple zones using modulo.

variable "zone" {
  description = "for single zone deployment"
  default = "europe-west4-b"
}

variable "zones" {
  description = "for multi zone deployment"
  default = ["europe-west4-b", "europe-west4-c"]
}

resource "google_compute_instance" "default" {
  count = "${var.role.count}"
  ...
  zone = "${var.zone != "" ? var.zone: var.zones[ count.index % length(var.zones) ]}"
  ...
}

This distribution mechanism allow to distribute nodes evenly across zones.
E.g. zones = [A,B] - instance-1 will be in A, instance-2 will in B, instance-3 will be in A again.
By adding zone C to zones will shift instance-3 to C.