Introduction to Terraform
Introduction
Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool. Instead of clicking through the AWS
console to create resources, you write configuration files that describe what you want,
and Terraform creates it for you.
This is a fundamental shift: your infrastructure becomes code that can be versioned,
reviewed, tested, and reproduced exactly.
Why This Matters
Everything you've done so far — creating IAM roles, S3 buckets, VPCs, EC2 instances —
you did through the console. That's fine for learning, but terrible for real work:
- How do you recreate this environment for a teammate?
- How do you set up identical staging and production environments?
- How do you track what changed and when?
- How do you review infrastructure changes before applying them?
Terraform solves all of this. In MLOps, you'll use Terraform to provision:
- Kubernetes clusters (EKS)
- Databases for experiment tracking
- S3 buckets for data and models
- IAM roles for your services
- Networking for your entire platform
"Infrastructure as Code" is not optional for professional MLOps work.
Tasks
Hint: brew install terraform (Mac) or download from terraform.io