Creating Loops in Terraform and Scaling Resources

Using loops in Terraform can be very powerful. It can take messy spaghetti code and turn it into something clean, simple, and easily understandable. It can make infrastructure scalable and efficient with just a few lines of code. The HCL language is both human-readable and machine-friendly, where components and lists can be iterated to create looping logic. Loops are commonly used in the Terraform community to make modules dynamic. For example, an EC2 Instance module can use loops to deploy multiple disks if needed or contain multiple IP addresses.

In this lab, you will create an EC2 Module that contains loops using various methods in Terraform.

Learning objectives

Upon completion of this lab, you will be able to:

• Understand how Terraform code can be made dynamic for reusability using loops
• Learn about count and for_each loops

Intended audience

• Individuals studying to take the HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate exam
• Anyone interested in learning how to use Terraform to manage Cloud Service Providers

Prerequisites

You should be familiar with:

• Cloud Services
• DevOps
• Basic understanding of Terraform modules and variables

The following course and lab can be used to fulfill the prerequisites:

• Introduction to DevOps
• Creating Reusable Infrastructure with Terraform Modules
• Integrating Conditional Logic into Terraform Configurations

Updates

January 4th, 2024 - Lab updated to utilize CodeTour IDE

March 16th, 2023 - Resolved IDE URL issue