Switching gcloud accounts for Terraform and Kubernetes

Question

I have two emails associated with two separate gcloud projects.

I can easily switch the projects with:

$ gcloud auth list
  Credentialed Accounts
ACTIVE  ACCOUNT
        first@project1
*       second@project2

$ gcloud config set account first@project1

I can then see, that gcloud did change the active account. I can also do this with:

$ gcloud config configurations list
...
$ gcloud config configurations set project1

And I can see the active configuration changes.

However it does not seem to have any effect for kubectl and terraform commands as they still use the previous configuration.

What am i doing wrong? How should I switch between the projects? It seems it has something to do with application-default account, but that looks it cannot be easily switched without relogin?

Harsh Manvar Harsh Manvar · Accepted Answer · 2021-10-03T06:47:18

Kubectl and terraform have own config or we can say context

for kubectl you need to change the cluster config using

kubectl config get-contexts

kubectl config use-context <cluster-name>

Or else each time you have set the context of Kubernetes cluster using Gcloud and it will get auto changed for kubectl

gcloud container clusters get-credentials cluster-name which takes the --project also.

Read more at : https://cloud.google.com/kubernetes-engine/docs/how-to/cluster-access-for-kubectl

For changing project in terraform there are different ways

Using different serviceaccount keys JSON
Changing project config inside terraform provider
Setting up environment variable GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS

setting project inside the Provider

provider "google" {
  project     = "my-project-id"
  region      = "us-central1"
  zone        = "us-central1-c"
}

https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs/guides/provider_reference

Best approach to use : https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs/guides/provider_reference#credentials-1

As you are writing IAC so all config in code.

List of all possible methods for authentication terraform:

https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/google/latest/docs/guides/provider_reference#authentication

Switching gcloud accounts for Terraform and Kubernetes

2 Answers