🚀 Day 2 – Launching EC2 Instances with Terraform

Date: May 27, 2025

Author: Juliet Wanjiku (@julietwainoi)

📘 What I Learned

• Defining infrastructure using Terraform
• Launching an EC2 instance with a main.tf file
• Using terraform init, plan, and apply
• Configuring a web server with user_data
• Understanding basic AWS security groups

🛠️ Infrastructure Details

Single Server Deployment

• Region: us-east-1
• Instance Type: t2.micro
• Security Group: Allows SSH (port 22)

Web Server Deployment

• Region: us-east-1
• Instance Type: t2.micro
• Security Group: Allows HTTP (port 80)
• Extras: Installs NGINX via user_data

📁 Project Structure

Day2/
├── Submissions/
│   └── julietwainoi/
│       ├── architecture/
│       │   ├── single-server.png
│       │   └── web-server.png
│       ├── terraform/
│       │   ├── single-server/
│       │   │   └── main.tf
│       │   └── web-server/
│       │       └── main.tf
│       └── submission.md
    

📸 Diagrams

• single-server.png – EC2 instance + SSH access
• web-server.png – EC2 instance + HTTP access (NGINX)

📌 Sample Terraform Configuration

resource "aws_instance" "web" {
  ami           = "ami-0c55b159cbfafe1f0"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
  user_data     = <<-EOF
    #!/bin/bash
    sudo apt update
    sudo apt install -y nginx
    systemctl start nginx
    systemctl enable nginx
  EOF

  tags = {
    Name = "WebServer"
  }
}
    

🧠 Reflection

I now feel more confident provisioning AWS infrastructure using Terraform. Seeing everything come together from code to a running EC2 instance was very rewarding.

🔗 Resources

• Terraform Docs: AWS Instance
• My GitHub Repo

🎯 What's Next?

Looking forward to building multi-instance setups and exploring modules. On to Day 3!

— Juliet