Immutable infrastructure concept in Terraform - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Immutable Infrastructure Concept with Terraform

📖 Scenario: You are working as a cloud engineer. Your team wants to use immutable infrastructure to deploy a simple web server. This means instead of changing the existing server, you will create a new server each time you deploy. This helps avoid errors and keeps the system stable.

🎯 Goal: Build a Terraform configuration that creates an AWS EC2 instance with immutable infrastructure principles. You will first define the instance data, then add a configuration variable, apply the main resource block, and finally complete the setup with a tag to identify the instance.

📋 What You'll Learn

Use Terraform to define AWS EC2 instance configuration

Create a variable for the AMI ID

Define the EC2 instance resource using the variable

Add a tag to the instance for identification

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Immutable infrastructure helps teams deploy cloud servers safely by replacing servers instead of changing them. This reduces errors and downtime.

💼 Career

Cloud engineers and DevOps professionals use Terraform and immutable infrastructure to automate and improve cloud deployments.

1

Define the AWS provider and instance data

Write Terraform code to set the AWS provider with region us-east-1 and create a variable called ami_id with default value "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0".

Terraform

# Set AWS provider and define ami_id variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use provider "aws" block to set the region. Use variable "ami_id" block with default to set the AMI ID.

2

Add instance type configuration

Add a variable called instance_type with default value "t2.micro" to specify the EC2 instance type.

Terraform

provider "aws" {
  region = "us-east-1"
}

variable "ami_id" {
  default = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
}

# Define instance_type variable
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use a variable block named instance_type with a default value.

3

Create the EC2 instance resource

Write a resource block named aws_instance with name web_server. Use var.ami_id for the AMI and var.instance_type for the instance type.

Terraform

provider "aws" {
  region = "us-east-1"
}

variable "ami_id" {
  default = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
}

variable "instance_type" {
  default = "t2.micro"
}

# Create aws_instance resource named web_server
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use resource "aws_instance" "web_server" block. Set ami and instance_type using variables.

4

Add a Name tag to the EC2 instance

Inside the aws_instance.web_server resource, add a tags block with Name = "ImmutableWebServer" to identify the instance.

Terraform

provider "aws" {
  region = "us-east-1"
}

variable "ami_id" {
  default = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
}

variable "instance_type" {
  default = "t2.micro"
}

resource "aws_instance" "web_server" {
  ami           = var.ami_id
  instance_type = var.instance_type

  # Add tags block here
  # Your code here
}

Need a hint?

Inside the resource block, add tags = { Name = "ImmutableWebServer" } to label the instance.