Terraform Basics

Companion lab for the Medium article Creating Your First Instance with Terraform. Part of my Terraform fundamentals series — more on Medium.

---

What you'll learn

How to provision your first AWS EC2 instance with Terraform from scratch — understanding providers, input variables, local state, and the plan → apply → destroy resource lifecycle.

Architecture

┌──────────────────┐       ┌──────────────────────┐
│   Terraform      │       │   AWS                │
│   (local state)  │ ────► │   EC2 t3.small       │
│                  │       │   region: us-east-1  │
└──────────────────┘       └──────────────────────┘

What's inside

File	Purpose
provider.tf	Declares the AWS provider (v5.31.0) and region
variables.tf	Defines region and vm_name input variables
main.tf	Creates the EC2 instance resource with tags
backend.tf	Configures local state backend

Prerequisites

• Terraform ≥ 1.5
• AWS CLI configured (aws configure) with a default profile
• An AWS account (free tier covers this lab)

Quick start

# Initialize providers and backend
terraform init

# Preview what will be created
terraform plan

# Provision the instance
terraform apply

After apply, a t3.small EC2 instance named vm01 will exist in us-east-1, tagged with Terraform = true.

Cleanup

terraform destroy

Always destroy lab resources — EC2 instances accrue hourly charges.

Key concepts

• Providers — how Terraform talks to cloud APIs (hashicorp/aws)
• Input variables — parameterize your infrastructure (var.region, var.vm_name)
• State — Terraform's source of truth for what exists (local backend here)
• Resource lifecycle — plan previews, apply creates, destroy removes

Series

Part of my Terraform fundamentals series:

• Next: Managing Environments with Terraform Workspaces
• Also in series: Using Multiple Providers

All articles on Medium.