Outputs as documentation in Terraform - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Outputs as documentation

📖 Scenario: You are setting up a simple cloud infrastructure using Terraform. You want to make sure that after deployment, important information about your resources is easy to find and understand. Outputs in Terraform help you document and share key details about your infrastructure.

🎯 Goal: Create Terraform outputs that clearly document the important attributes of your deployed resources, so anyone can quickly see the essential information after deployment.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a Terraform variable for the instance name

Define a resource block for an AWS EC2 instance with the given name

Add outputs to show the instance ID and public IP

Use outputs to document the instance name and instance type

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Outputs in Terraform help teams quickly find important information about deployed resources without searching through code or cloud consoles.

💼 Career

Knowing how to use outputs for documentation is essential for cloud engineers to communicate infrastructure details clearly and maintain infrastructure as code.

1

Create a Terraform variable for the instance name

Write a Terraform variable block named instance_name with type string and default value "my-instance".

Terraform

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the variable block with type and default attributes.

2

Define an AWS EC2 instance resource using the variable

Write a Terraform resource block named aws_instance with resource name example. Set the ami to "ami-12345678", instance_type to "t2.micro", and tags with Name set to the variable instance_name.

Terraform

variable "instance_name" {
  type    = string
  default = "my-instance"
}

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use resource "aws_instance" "example" and set the attributes exactly as specified.

3

Add outputs for instance ID and public IP

Write two Terraform output blocks named instance_id and instance_public_ip. Set their value to aws_instance.example.id and aws_instance.example.public_ip respectively.

Terraform

variable "instance_name" {
  type    = string
  default = "my-instance"
}

resource "aws_instance" "example" {
  ami           = "ami-12345678"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
  tags = {
    Name = var.instance_name
  }
}

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use output blocks with the exact names and values.

4

Add outputs to document instance name and instance type

Write two Terraform output blocks named instance_name_output and instance_type_output. Set their value to var.instance_name and aws_instance.example.instance_type respectively. Add description attributes explaining these outputs as documentation.

Terraform

variable "instance_name" {
  type    = string
  default = "my-instance"
}

resource "aws_instance" "example" {
  ami           = "ami-12345678"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
  tags = {
    Name = var.instance_name
  }
}

output "instance_id" {
  value = aws_instance.example.id
}

output "instance_public_ip" {
  value = aws_instance.example.public_ip
}

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Add description attributes to outputs to explain their purpose.