How I Automated Infrastructure Deployment on AWS Using Terraform
Written as a real-world DevOps case study — clear and professional.
Introduction
Managing cloud infrastructure manually can quickly become complex and error-prone — especially when deploying multiple environments like staging, QA, and production. As a DevOps Engineer, I wanted a faster, consistent, and more reliable way to deploy AWS resources. That’s when I turned to Terraform, an open-source Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tool that lets you automate and version-control your entire infrastructure.
In this post, I’ll walk you through how I used Terraform to automate AWS provisioning, reduce setup time by 80%, and eliminate configuration drift across environments.
Why Terraform for AWS?
Terraform stands out because it’s:
- Declarative: You define what infrastructure you want, not how to build it.
- Idempotent: Running the same code multiple times produces the same result.
- Multi-cloud: Works seamlessly across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
- Version-controlled: Integrates easily with Git for tracking changes.
For AWS, Terraform supports nearly every service — from EC2 and S3 to VPCs, RDS, and IAM roles — through official providers.
Project Overview
My goal was to automate a two-tier web application environment that included:
- A VPC with public and private subnets
- EC2 instances for the web application
- An RDS MySQL database in a private subnet
- Security groups for controlled access
- S3 bucket for storing static files
