8-Chems

Cloud Engineering · Infrastructure as Code · ~28 min read Provisioning Google Cloud APIs the Right Way: A Complete Terraform Walkthrough (Modules, IAM/WIF Deep-Dive, and Tests) Most Terraform tutorials for Google Cloud jump straight into resources — a bucket here, a Cloud Run service there — and quietly skip the step that breaks everything on a fresh project: enabling the underlying APIs first , and understanding how those APIs actually trust each other through IAM . If you've ever seen Error 403: API [x] not enabled on project [y] , or spent an afternoon debugging why a GitHub Actions job can't authenticate to GCP, this post is for you. We're going to build a real, working use case — a serverless event-driven data pipeline — entirely with Terraform, structured as reusable modules rather than one flat file, enabling every API it needs, explaining the parameters on every resource we write, and mapping out exactly how IAM and Workload Identity ...