Course Introduction

Hello and welcome to the Terraform for Beginners lesson! My name is Vijin Palazhi, and I'll be guiding you through this comprehensive introduction to Terraform and Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

In this lesson, you will learn how Terraform fits into modern IT infrastructure management and gain hands-on experience with the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). We start with an overview of Terraform, its role in automating infrastructure, and a discussion on IaC, followed by the installation process and HCL basics to set the foundation for practical labs.

After establishing the fundamentals, we will explore core Terraform concepts including:

• Providers and Resources: How Terraform interacts with cloud and on-premises services
• Input and Output Variables: Parameterizing configurations
• Dependencies and Resource Attributes: Managing relationships between resources
• Terraform State: What state is, why it matters, and best practices for managing it

Next, we will cover Terraform commands and an overview of mutable versus immutable infrastructure, illustrating how your resources evolve over time.

The lesson then transitions to vital topics including:

• Data Sources & Meta-Arguments
• Version Constraints
• AWS Essentials: Setting up an AWS account and configuring core services like IAM, S3, and DynamoDB, with practical labs demonstrating provisioning via Terraform

We’ll also discuss remote state management, state locking, and using a backend to store your state file, along with how Terraform state commands help maintain and troubleshoot your deployments.

Following state management, the course introduces AWS EC2 through live demonstrations on provisioning instances, and then explores additional advanced functionalities:

• Provisioners
• Resource Taints and Debugging
• Terraform Modules

We'll wrap up the core content by discussing:

• Terraform Functions and Conditional Expressions
• Workspaces
• Terraform Cloud features

In the AWS section, demonstration videos guide you through the AWS Management Console to set up essential services, followed by hands-on labs where you provision and manage infrastructure seamlessly.

I am very excited to begin this journey with you. Let's get started!