Better Infrastructure Management with Terraform on AWS

Getting started

You can do the exercises either on your local machine with your IDE of choice, or use a preconfigured Gitpod Cloud development environment (see below). If you'd like to try out Gitpod, you can skip the Terraform installation step below.

Install Terraform

To install Terraform, we recommend using a version manager such as tfswitch or tfenv.

On MacOS and Linux systems, you can install them with brew:

brew install warrensbox/tap/tfswitch or brew install tfenv

On Windows there is currently no widely adopted Terraform version manager. You can install a specific version x.y.z of Terraform with Chocolately:

choco install terraform --version=x.y.z

For the exercises, we'll be using Terraform versions >=1.0.0

Use Gitpod

Create a free Gitpod account at gitpod.io. You can then open the exercise repository in a cloud IDE via the badge under the header of this README.

This will set up a preconfigured development environment for you, which includes both tfswitch and the awscli.

Configure AWS credentials

In order for Terraform to deploy infrastructure on AWS, Terraform needs to make authenticated API requests on your behalf. You will receive an AWS_ACCES_KEY_ID and AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY from the instructor.

First make sure that you have the AWS CLI installed. Then run aws configure --profile academy and fill in the access keys and configure the region and output format as follows:

aws configure --profile academy
AWS Access Key ID [None]: $YOUR_ACCES_KEY_ID
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: $YOUR_SECRET_ACCES_KEY
Default region name [None]: eu-west-1
Default output format [None]: json

Ready... Set... Go

You should now be able to start with the exercises. cd your way into the first exercise folder (00_provider_config), read the instructions in the README.md and try to write some Terraform code to solve the problem. Don't worrry, the majority of the code you can find in or adapt from the Terraform provider documentation! Good luck, and remember: terrafrom init, terraform plan, and terrafrom apply all the things!

P.S.: Exercise 06_existing_infra is by far the most difficult one. Feel free to skip it initially and come back to it at the end, in case there is still some time left.