Part 1 Terraform bootcamp

The pace of part 1 starts slowly but ramps up quickly. Think of these first few chapters as your personal bootcamp for using Terraform. By the end of chapter 4, you will have a solid grasp of the technology and be well prepared for the advanced topics coming in later chapters. Here’s what’s ahead.

Chapter 1 is a basic introduction to Terraform. We cover all the usual topics, such as why Terraform was created, what problems it solves, and how it compares to similar technologies. The chapter ends with a simple example of deploying an EC2 instance to AWS.

Chapter 2 is a deep dive into Terraform: resource lifecycle and state management. We examine how Terraform generates and applies execution plans to perform CRUD operations on managed resources and see how state plays a role in the process.

Chapter 3 is our first look at variables and functions. Although Terraform's expressiveness is inhibited by it being a declarative programming language, you can still do some pretty interesting things with for expressions and local values.

Chapter 4 is the capstone project that brings together all the previous learning. We deploy a complete web server and database using Terraform and walk through how to structure Terraform configuration with nested modules.