Today marks Day 2 of my #30daysofAWSTerraform challenge! 🚀 After setting up the foundation, I dove deep into Providers—the engines that power Terraform—and learned why version control is critical for production stability.
We often assume Terraform init just "works," but understanding what it downloads and how to lock versions prevents breaking changes when a provider updates unexpectedly.
✅ Tasks Completed:
Provider Configuration: Defined the AWS provider block and understood the difference between Official, Partner, and Community providers.
Version Locking: Implemented required_providers to lock the AWS provider version using the pessimistic operator (~>) to ensure stability while allowing safe patch updates.
Initialisation: Ran Terraform init to download the specific provider plugins required for the project.
Authentication: Configured the AWS CLI (aws configure) to allow Terraform to interact with my AWS account securely.
📝 Notes:
What is a Provider? A plugin that translates HCL code into API calls that the Cloud Provider (AWS/Azure/GCP) understands.
Version Constraints:
version = "5.0" -> Exact match (Safest but rigid).
version = "~> 5.0" -> Allows updates to 5.x but prevents breaking changes in 6.0.
The "Dependency Hell" Solution: Always separate the Terraform CLI version (required_version) from the Provider version (required_providers) to avoid compatibility issues.
🔗 Resources:
My Code & Progress: https://github.com/Gokulprasath-N/Terraform-Full-Course-Aws/tree/main/lessons/day02
Video I watched: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFiMmaktnuM
I am excited to start provisioning actual resources like VPCs and EC2 instances tomorrow!
Top comments (0)