Terraform

Progress checklist

• Terraform >= 1.5 installed
• terraform version returns expected output
• Workspace directory created

All infrastructure in this walkthrough — VPC, subnets, EKS EKS
Elastic Kubernetes Service — AWS-managed Kubernetes control plane; you manage nodes and workloads, AWS runs the API server, etcd, and scheduler. cluster, node groups, IAM IAM
Identity and Access Management — the AWS service that controls permissions and roles for all resources. roles — is created and destroyed with Terraform Terraform
Terraform — the infrastructure-as-code tool used to create and manage all AWS resources in this walkthrough. . Nothing is created manually in the console (except one-off checks). Using Terraform means:

• Every change is reviewed before it’s applied
• The full environment can be torn down with one command (terraform destroy)
• State tracks what’s been created so incremental updates are safe

The Terraform code lives in a separate repository (aws-eks-terraform). You’ll clone it in the Git step.

1. Install Terraform. Required

   Use Terraform 1.5 or later. The walkthrough uses features from 1.5+.

   macOS

   Install via Homebrew (HashiCorp tap)

   brew tap hashicorp/tap
   brew install hashicorp/tap/terraform

   To upgrade later:

   brew upgrade hashicorp/tap/terraform

   Debian/Ubuntu

   Add the HashiCorp APT repository and install. If needed, install dependencies first: curl, gnupg, software-properties-common.

   Add HashiCorp repo (Debian/Ubuntu)

   sudo apt update
   sudo apt install -y curl gnupg software-properties-common
   curl -fsSL https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com/gpg \
     | sudo gpg --dearmor -o /usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg
   echo "deb [signed-by=/usr/share/keyrings/hashicorp-archive-keyring.gpg] \
     https://apt.releases.hashicorp.com $(lsb_release -cs) main" \
     | sudo tee /etc/apt/sources.list.d/hashicorp.list
   sudo apt update
   sudo apt install -y terraform

   RHEL / Fedora (dnf)

   Add the HashiCorp repository and install. If needed, install curl and gnupg2 first (e.g. sudo dnf install -y curl gnupg2).

   Add HashiCorp repo (RHEL/Fedora)

   sudo dnf config-manager --add-repo https://rpm.releases.hashicorp.com/RHEL/hashicorp.repo
   sudo dnf install -y terraform

2. Verify the installation.

   terraform version

   Expected output:

   Terraform v1.x.x
   on linux_amd64

   The version must be 1.5 or higher. If you have an older version installed via a different method, uninstall it first.

3. Create a workspace directory.

   Create a dedicated directory where you’ll clone and run Terraform. This keeps the walkthrough files separate from other projects.

   mkdir -p ~/workspace
   cd ~/workspace

   You’ll clone the Terraform repo into this directory in the Git step.

4. Understand the state setup.

   Local state (default)

   This walkthrough uses local state — Terraform writes a terraform.tfstate file in the working directory. That’s fine for a solo walkthrough on your own machine.

   For production use or shared team access, move to remote state (e.g. S3 + DynamoDB backend) so state is stored safely and multiple people or CI can apply changes without conflicts. The What else page has notes on this.

Next step

Continue to kubectl to install the Kubernetes CLI.