Terraforming AWS: learning material and demos

Start from following the main tutorial: https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/tutorials/aws-get-started and other resources to learn terraform and play with some simple architectures in AWS.

How to

Open each subfolders then run terraform init to fetch modules dependencies, then terraform plan to see the planning configuration, or to deploy use terraform apply to create resources on AWS.

You can incur in some charges for resources usage on AWS (most resources used in the samples are in the free tier if you have a new aws account like for ec2 micro), so always remember to terraform destroy to remove the resources on AWS after you see the expected results of your tests.

Common workflow for each exercise

• terraform init: fetch dependencies
• terraform fmt: format your template files
• terraform validate: validate the files
• terraform plan: check the planning on AWS that terraform will apply
• terraform apply: run deployment on AWS
• terraform show: show terraform current state
• terraform destroy: run deployment on AWS

Table of Contents

• Exercise 0: setup terraform: install the terraform CLI and check prerequisites

• Exercise 1: docker test on local machine: test terraform running a docker container locally

• Exercise 2: terraform basics: following the main tutorial we will try to deploy an ec2 instance, try basics commands and workflow using terraform, try terraform cloud

• Exercise 3: terraform variables: terraform different types of variables

• TODO

• Architecture examples: Different architectures on AWS using terraform, common patterns.

TODO: learning terraform basics

• learn the basic CLI commands and workflow
• most common variables types: string, numbers, bool, list, map
• local modules: to structure and encapsulate the configuration of the infra in a maintainable way
• test: we could work in terraform using tests and mocks!

TODO: AWS architectures Ideas

Here are some ideas to try on AWS with terraform:

• EC2 basics: create an ec2 instance, simple settings
• EC2: autoscaling, spot, other specific settings?
• s3 bucket
• s3 bucket for website hosting and CORS
• API Gateway > lambda (and optionally cognito for user auth?)
• lambda layers?
• s3 > SQS > lambda
• Custom VPC, NAT, subnets, ...
• Beanstalk for web: ELB, ec2, autoscaling, RDS optionally
• ECS: ec2, config, ECR for private docker repo
• CodeBuild, CodePipeline, ...