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Miracle Olorunsola
Miracle Olorunsola

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How a Hands-On Terraform Project Helped Me Finally Understand IaC

I’ve read about Terraform and Infrastructure as Code before, but it wasn’t until I used a Terraform crash course as a practice project that things truly clicked.

Instead of isolated examples, this course walks through a complete AWS infrastructure setup, which made Terraform concepts feel practical and connected.

What I Practiced

Using Terraform, I provisioned:
• An EC2 instance to run a Node.js application
• An RDS MySQL database
• An S3 bucket for file storage
• Security groups for controlled network access

Everything was defined as code and deployed using Terraform.

What This Helped Me Understand

• How Terraform state actually works and why it matters
• What state drift looks like and how Terraform detects it
• How providers and resources interact
• Why modules are important for reusable infrastructure
• How Infrastructure as Code supports scalability and consistency

Architecture Flow (Simplified)

Application code is hosted on GitHub

Terraform provisions AWS resources

The Node.js app runs on EC2

The app connects securely to RDS on port 3306

The app interacts with S3 for storage

Getting Started (What I Did)
cd project
git clone https://github.com/verma-kunal/nodejs-mysql.git ./app
terraform init
terraform apply

This project helped me move from “I know what Terraform is” to “I understand how Terraform is used in real cloud environments.”

If you’re learning Terraform for DevOps or DevSecOps roles, I highly recommend learning it through end-to-end projects like this.

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