I’ve been thinking of moving my Kubernetes lab into the cloud, but with cloud resource usage being scrutinized by the IT department, running them 24x7 the way I’m used to is a no-go. I need a setup that meets the following requirements: Simple to create and tear down Applications must be pre-deployed when the cluster is up, as close to “just the way I left it there last night” as possible cost $0 when the setup has been switched off I eventually settled on the idea of an ephemeral Kubernetes lab environment using Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and GitOps practices, which I will cover in this post.

Intro I’ve been doing a lot with terraform lately, and I’ve been looking for ways to make my terraform configurations a lot simpler and have less repetition. Like a lot of people, I’ve found myself repeating the same code over and over. An example is where I repeat the same resource over and over but with different configuration parameters. It’s essentially the same resource. Why should I do this? There has to be a better way.