Module 9: Infrastructure as Code

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is the practice of managing cloud resources through machine-readable definition files rather than manual CLI commands or clicking through a console. This module covers the three major IaC paradigms: Terraform (cloud-agnostic provisioning), CloudFormation (AWS-native provisioning), and configuration management tools like Ansible.

We begin with Terraform Basics — HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), providers, resources, state management, modules, workspaces, and Terraform Cloud. Terraform is the industry-standard IaC tool, supporting all major cloud providers plus hundreds of third-party services.

Next, AWS CloudFormation covers templates, resources, parameters, change sets, stacks, and StackSets. You will learn how CloudFormation differs from Terraform and when each tool is appropriate.

Configuration Management explores Ansible, Chef, and Puppet, contrasting immutable infrastructure (provisioning new resources for each change) with mutable infrastructure (updating existing resources in place).

The module concludes with a capstone project where you deploy a VPC, EC2 instances, and RDS database entirely through Terraform — demonstrating real-world IaC practices.

By the end of this module you will be able to write Terraform configurations for multi-cloud deployments, understand when to use Terraform vs CloudFormation, manage configuration drift with Ansible, and apply immutable infrastructure principles to your provisioning workflows.