PART IV: Infrastructure

15. Creating a zone

WARNING: Instructions not up-to-date.

1. Create a user account to one of the cloud service platforms. For now, you should choose Google Cloud because Taito CLI support for other cloud providers is still work-in-progress. As a new Google Cloud user you get €300 worth of cloud services for free, so trying will cost you nothing. Go to Google Cloud console and log in with your Google user account.
2. Register a domain name, and get a DNS service for configuring IP addresses for the domain. If you don't have these already, you can buy an affordable domain name from namecheap. Namecheap provides also DNS, but since you already have a Google Cloud account, you can also use the Google Cloud DNS with your domain name.

3. Create a taito zone based on the Google Cloud example with the following commands. Replace EDIT with your favorite editor. (TODO: zone create TEMPLATE)

   cp -r taito-cli/examples/zones/gcp my-zone
   cd my-zone
   EDIT taito-config.sh
   EDIT *.yaml
   taito zone apply

A taito zone provides an infrastructure that your projects are deployed on. The Google Cloud example creates you Kubernetes and PostgreSQL clusters among other things. You usually have at least two taito zones: one for development and testing purposes, and an another one for production usage. In these exercises, however, you require only one taito zone.

Do not confuse taito zones with cloud provider regions and zones. One taito zone may use multiple cloud provider regions and zones to achieve high availability and regional resiliency.

If you want to know more, see Appendix C: Modern server infrastructure.

TODO:

• use some text from the old example.
• optional: setup remote state for Terraform

Next: 16. Zone maintenance