If you have ever clicked through the AWS console, Azure portal, or GCP dashboard to create cloud resources, you know the pain: it's slow, hard to repeat reliably across staging and production, and easy to get wrong. Infrastructure as Code (IaC) solves this problem, and Terraform is the most widely used IaC tool in industry.
This guide takes you from "what is IaC" to running your first Terraform deployment on AWS, then walks through a working VPC + EC2 example you can adapt for production. It also covers the BUSL / OpenTofu split from 2023 that every Terraform learner in 2026 should understand.
What is Infrastructure as Code?
Infrastructure as code is the practice of managing cloud resources — servers, databases, networks, storage, security groups — through configuration files rather than manual clicks in a web console. You describe the infrastructure you want in text files, store those files in Git, and let an IaC tool create and update the real resources to match.
The practical benefits compound:
