Terraform Architecture and Providers on GCP

This lab aligns the GCP experience with the AWS and Azure provider architecture labs while staying native to Google Cloud. You will work through the same Terraform concepts using the Google provider and Google Compute Engine.

You will:

• Lock and upgrade the Google provider with the dependency lock file
• Deploy a Compute Engine VM that demonstrates `local-exec`, `remote-exec`, and `file` provisioners
• Replace provisioners with a GCP startup script for a more cloud-native bootstrap workflow
• See how Terraform can recreate an instance when startup configuration changes

The focus is on Terraform architecture decisions: how providers are selected, when provisioners are useful, and why startup scripts are usually the better long-term pattern.