Multiple Identical Resources via Terraform

There isn’t really a looping construct, but there’s still a way to perform a type of a loop in terraform.

Btw – as a quick aside, the difference between a terraform.tfvars and a variables.tf file is simply one of providing default values (the tfvars is used to set all default values). If you set your default values within the .tf file itself, the tfvars is unnecessary.

Modified Looping in Terraform

Step 1 – Add an f5_app_count variable, which will contain the number of F5 instances.

Step 2 – The actual value is instantiated in step 2 in the terraform.tfvars file  – as such

f5_count = 3

Step 3 – In the google_compute_instance_template resource, add the count property (which is available for all resources and data Terraform blocks).

To further clarify resource names, the name of the compute_instance resource, we add the suffix with the current index of the count that we increment by 1.

resource "google_compute_instance_template" "f5-template" {
  count = var.f5_app_count   
  name         = "${var.environment}-f5-${count.index+1}"
  machine_type = "${var.instance_type}"
  ...
 }