Resource arguments and attributes in Terraform - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Terraform Resource Arguments and Attributes

📖 Scenario: You are setting up a simple cloud infrastructure using Terraform. You want to create a virtual machine instance with specific settings and then access its attributes to use elsewhere in your configuration.

🎯 Goal: Build a Terraform configuration that defines a virtual machine resource with given arguments and then outputs one of its attributes.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a resource block for an AWS EC2 instance named example.

Set the ami argument to "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0".

Set the instance_type argument to "t2.micro".

Create an output named instance_id that outputs the instance's ID attribute.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Terraform is widely used to automate cloud infrastructure setup. Defining resources with arguments and accessing their attributes is fundamental to managing cloud environments.

💼 Career

Cloud engineers and DevOps professionals use Terraform to create and manage infrastructure efficiently and reproducibly.

1

Create the AWS EC2 instance resource

Create a Terraform resource block named aws_instance with the resource name example. Set the ami argument to "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0" and the instance_type argument to "t2.micro".

Terraform

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the resource keyword followed by the resource type aws_instance and the name example. Inside the block, set the ami and instance_type arguments exactly as specified.

2

Add a tag argument to the instance

Inside the aws_instance.example resource block, add a tags argument with a map containing Name = "ExampleInstance".

Terraform

resource "aws_instance" "example" {
  ami           = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
  # Your code here
}

Need a hint?

Use the tags argument with curly braces to define a map. Inside, set the key Name to the value "ExampleInstance".

3

Create an output for the instance ID

Create an output block named instance_id that outputs the attribute id of the resource aws_instance.example.

Terraform

resource "aws_instance" "example" {
  ami           = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
  tags = {
    Name = "ExampleInstance"
  }
}

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the output keyword with the name instance_id. Inside, set value to aws_instance.example.id to get the instance's ID.

4

Add a provider block for AWS

Add a provider block for aws with the region set to "us-east-1".

Terraform

# Your code here

resource "aws_instance" "example" {
  ami           = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
  tags = {
    Name = "ExampleInstance"
  }
}

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

Need a hint?

Use the provider block with the name aws. Inside, set the region argument to "us-east-1".