Why outputs expose useful information in Terraform - See It in Action

Why outputs expose useful information

📖 Scenario: You are setting up a simple cloud infrastructure using Terraform. You want to create a virtual machine and then expose its IP address as an output. This output will help you easily find the IP address after deployment without searching through the cloud console.

🎯 Goal: Create a Terraform configuration that defines a virtual machine resource and exposes its public IP address using an output variable.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a resource block for a virtual machine named example_vm.

Define an output variable named vm_ip that exposes the public IP address of example_vm.

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Outputs help you quickly find important details like IP addresses after deploying cloud resources, saving time and effort.

💼 Career

Knowing how to expose useful information with outputs is essential for cloud engineers to manage and share infrastructure details effectively.

1

Create a virtual machine resource

Create a resource block named example_vm of type aws_instance with the ami set to "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0" and instance_type set to "t2.micro".

Terraform

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the resource keyword to define the virtual machine with the exact name and properties.

2

Add a configuration variable for the output

Create an output block named vm_ip but leave the value empty for now.

Terraform

resource "aws_instance" "example_vm" {
  ami           = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
}

# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the output keyword and give it the name vm_ip. Set value to an empty string for now.

3

Set the output value to the VM's public IP

Set the value of the output vm_ip to the public IP address of the example_vm resource using aws_instance.example_vm.public_ip.

Terraform

resource "aws_instance" "example_vm" {
  ami           = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
}

output "vm_ip" {
  # Set the value to the VM's public IP
  value = ""
}

Need a hint?

Use the resource reference aws_instance.example_vm.public_ip to get the public IP address.

4

Add a description to the output

Add a description to the output vm_ip with the text "The public IP address of the example VM".

Terraform

resource "aws_instance" "example_vm" {
  ami           = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
}

output "vm_ip" {
  value = aws_instance.example_vm.public_ip
  # Add description here
}

Need a hint?

Add the description attribute inside the output block with the exact text.