GCP App Engine template

This repository contains a couple of example applications and supporting infrastructure and configuration files for Google App Engine. It is meant to be used by people in the GSA (and other agencies) as a guide to quickly get a lightweight application running safely and securely in GCP.

The overall idea behind this project is to create a template that people can clone, add their application to, provision some GCP Projects, and then enable CircleCI to automatically provision dev/staging/production environments into those GCP Projects with good secrets management, backups, tests, and other controls that make their project automatically use best DevSecOps practices, saving a lot of time/budget and also making it easy for people to get an ATO.

How to use this template

This template is meant to be forked and edited. Probably most of this documentation will be gone, replaced by documentation of your application, it's technology, and your processes and procedures.

If you would like to understand the architecture of the project and how it fulfils the DevSecOps principles, you should start here and read our DevSecOps documentation.
If you would like to test out how to get GCP going with some example apps, then follow the Bootstrap Process. This is a good place to start just to get your feet wet with GCP and take the example apps for a test drive.
If you would like to begin customizing this template for your application, then you should consult the Customization document.
Compliance documentation and information about how to get a GSA LATO using apps launched with this template can be found in Compliance.md.
Operational procedures and workflows can be found in the Workflows documentation. This is an overview of how you should do development using a modified gitops system, how to find logs, update the infrastructure, rotate secrets, etc.

Technologies used

Gitops/Infrastructure As Code

This is less a technology, and more of a way of managing a system only using code. The idea is that aside from perhaps some one-off startup tasks, almost everything is managed by checking in code and moving it between branches. This ensures that all changes to the system are contained in git, and thus may be rolled back or reconstructed in a Disaster Recovery scenario.

Google App Engine

App Engine is a simple way to deploy applications that will automatically scale up and down according to load, collect logs, etc. https://cloud.google.com/appengine/

Google Cloud SQL

Cloud SQL is an easy way to provision and manage databases. We are using PostgreSQL for our infrastructure, but you can use MySQL if you like. Our configuration sets the production database to be HA, with staging/dev non-HA.

Terraform

Terraform orchestrates the project setup, creating databases, storage, secrets, etc. https://www.terraform.io/

Circle CI

Terraform and the Google Cloud SDK are invoked on commit by Circle CI, which automates all of the terraform, code deployment, testing and scanning tasks for each environment. https://circleci.com/

OWASP ZAP

ZAP is a proxy that can be used to scan an app for common security vulnerabilities. https://www.owasp.org/index.php/OWASP_Zed_Attack_Proxy_Project

Example Applications

Rails / App Engine

This is a simple app that uses ActiveRecord to store a "blog" in a db. It is deployed to GCP with an OAuth2 Proxy in front of it, so to use it properly, you will need an Identity Provider to configure it with like login.gov.

To test locally, have ruby/bundler installed and run cd rails-example && bundle install && bin/rails server. You will be able to access the application on http://localhost:3000/.

.NET Core / App Engine

This is a simple app that creates a list of URLs for "blogs" in a database.
This may change, but for now, you must use the netcoreapp2.1 framework for applications deployed into App Engine. It uses KMS to store antiforgery keys, and has basic auth enabled.

To test locally, cd dotnet-example && dotnet run. This will operate on a local blogging.db sqlite db.

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