Using Terraform to deploy a simple server on EC2

Steps to deploy a simple web server on EC2 instance

1) Setup your AWS account

Go to https://aws.amazon.com to create your new account. Your new account is the root user and have permissions to do absolutely anything with your account. It is always a good idea to create users with different permissions for you account.

2) Create new user with limited permissions.

Login to use aws console and seach IAM (Identiy and access mangemnet). Click on users and click on "Addd User" button to add new user. Make sure that Programmatic access (Enables an access key ID and secret access key for the AWS API, CLI, SDK, and other development tools) checkbox is enabled. In the permissions area make sure to select following permissions

AmazonEC2FullAccess AmazonS3FullAccess AmazonRDSFullAccess AmazonCloudWatchFullAccess IAMFullAccess

Select a name for your permission group and finish the process. Note down the access key and secret, they will never appear in front of you again.

3) Download and install Terraform.

Terraform is a single binary that you just need to download and add in your system path.https://www.terraform.io/downloads.html

To make sure that Terraform is running, open a terminal window and type command terraform --version. It should show you the version of installed terraform binary like the following.

Terraform v0.11.4

4) Setup AWS credentials in your machine.

In order for terraform to setup your infrastructure in your account it needs your security crendentials. You can setup your credentials as environment variable or in $HOME/.aws/credentials file. The content of credentials file should look like the following [default] aws_access_key_id=AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE aws_secret_access_key=wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY

For more information see the following link http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-getting-started.html

5) Create folder and .tf File.

The first and easiest step is to create an empty folder and create a file with name create_ec2_instance.tf. Setup your provider with the following lines.

provider "aws" { region = "us-east-1" }

AWS has data centers divided into regions and zones. A region is a separate geographic area such as us-east-1 and eu-west-1 which represent North Virginia nd Ireland. Within each region there are multiple isolated data centers known as availability zones such as us-east-1a etc. You can add whatever region you like or whatever region you are in.

6) Create new EC2 Instance

Each cloud provider supports different kinds of resources like databases, servers, load balancers etc. To deploy a single server in AWS which is known as EC2 instance (Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud Instance), you can add the aws_instance configuration. The general syntax of resource is

resource "PROVIDER_TYPE" "NAME" { [CONFIG ...] }

Where PROVIDER is the name of provider like aws, azure etc. and TYPE is the type of resource that you want to create e.g instance. NAME is the identifier that you will use to reference this resource throughout the terraform code. CONFIG consists of one or more configuration parameters that are specific to that resource. These configuration can differe from provider to provider and also according to your needs. For example to add EC2 instance we can provide 6 different configurations but I will use only couple of them here i.e ami and instance_type.

Enough talking, now add code. Let's add following lines in our create_ec2_instance.tf file

resource "aws_instance" "example" { ami = "ami-40d28157" instance_type = "t2.micro" }

AMI (Amazon machine image) provides the information required to launch an EC2 instance. These AMIs are available free/paid in AWS marketplace. ami-40d28157 is the ID of an ubuntu 16.04 AMI.

Instance_type is the type of EC2 instance. Each type provides different CPU, memory and networking capacity. t2.micro has one virtual CPU, 1 GB memory and is part of the AWS free tier.

7) Initialize terraform

Open command terminal and go to the folder where you have create_ec2_instance.tf and run following command terraform init

This command will create a .terraform folder in your working directory and download the plugins needed to create your infrastrucutre. Since you are using aws, it will download binary related to aws only.

8) Run Terraform Plan

Now run following command terraform plan

This command tells you what terraform will actually do before making any changes. You can review them before actually executing the command. In the output the resources with a plus sign will be created, resources with a minus will be deleted and resources with ~ sign will get modified. The last line tells you the summary of all actions. For example the create_ec2_instance.tf that we have created in this example will output following as summary of actions.

Plan: 1 to add, 0 to change, 0 to destroy.

9) Let terraform actually create your instance

To let terraform actually create the instance, run the following command

terraform apply

10) Deploy your server

Since we can now launch our EC2 instance without logging into the AWS console, we are ready to deploy a web server on the EC2 instance, which is most probably you would like to have on your EC2 instance.

The major steps in this process are

1. Launch an EC2 machine
2. Install apache server
3. Allow traffic from outside to connect to your EC2 machine
4. Create a user who can SSH into the server later. (This step is optional if you don't plan to login to your server)

Let's create a new file with name deploy_apache_on_ec2.tf

Create new security group

Step 10.1: Allow in-bound public access

resource "aws_security_group" "public-group" {
ingress {
from_port = 8080
to_port = 8080
protocol = "tcp"
cidr_blocks = ["0.0.0.0/0"]
} tags { Name = "public-group-name" } }

Step 10.2: Create security group to enable SSH access

resource "aws_security_group" "sshable-group"{ name = "SSH group"

ingress{
 from_port = 22
 to_port =22
 protocol = "tcp"
 cidr_blocks = ["0.0.0.0/0"]
}

egress {
    from_port = 0
    to_port = 0
    protocol = "-1"
    cidr_blocks = ["0.0.0.0/0"]
  }



tags {
 Name = "web_server_deployment"
}

}

Step 3: Create EC2 Instance and run commands to deploy apache server

resource "aws_instance" "Ubuntu1604" { ami = "ami-40d28157" instance_type = "t2.micro" tags{ Name="ubuntu-machine" } vpc_security_group_ids = ["${aws_security_group.sshable-group.id}"]

user_data = <<-EOF #!/bin/bash
sudo apt update sudo apt -q -y upgrade
DEBIAN_FRONTEND=noninteractive sudo -E apt install -q -y lamp-server^
cd /var/www/html/ sudo mv index.html index.html.backup sudo echo 'Hello World' | sudo tee index.html EOF }