I Built My First AWS Network with Terraform. Here's Everything That Went Wrong.

Week 1 of a five-week Infrastructure-as-Code journey, told honestly: the 403s, the 400s, the missing resource, and the security group I got wrong twice.

I recently started a structured five-week Terraform course, and I made myself a promise: I would document the journey as it actually happened, not the cleaned-up version where every terraform apply works on the first try.

Spoiler: almost nothing worked on the first try. And that turned out to be the best part.

By the end of Week 1, the assignment was to build a complete, self-contained network on AWS using nothing but code: a VPC, a public subnet, a private subnet, an EC2 instance living in the public subnet, and a security group protecting it. Eight resources, all defined in HCL, all provisioned with a single command.

Here is how it really went.