• Overview
• Setup
  • Prereqs
  • Quick Start
  • Commands
• How it Works

This repo contains Terraform code that can be used to quickly spin up a CentOS instance in the AWS U.S. East Coast region for testing cloud related functions. It creates a dedicated VPC and dependencies (routes, subnets, NACL, security group, IAM role, SSH keypair, ...). The produced instance is nicknamed (and tagged) gimmepubinstance. Feel free to use it as a base cloud environment for a bigger purpose.

Have the following steps completed prior to running terraform:

1. AWS account created
2. Install aws cli on your laptop/workstation
3. AWS CLI configured with your AWS root account user credentials saved under $HOME/.aws/credentials
4. local ssh key pair (priv/pub) at the following location: ~/.ssh.id_rsa.pub (something like ssh-keygen can be used to create them)
5. Terraform CLI installed on your laptop/workstation
6. Install git cli on your laptop/workstation
7. Clone this repo to your laptop/workstation using git. Make sure to take note of its path on your file system. You'll need it in a later step.

If you want to fully understand what the code in this repo does, skip to the next sections for step by step procedures. If you want to quickly get up and running from a *nix laptop/workstations, a sample aliases file has been included in this repo that turns the detailed commands into a single word bash alias. Perform these steps to setup the one word aliases gimmepubinstance & deletegimmeinstance.

1. Add the below to the bottom of your ~/.bashrc file making sure to update /path/to/gimmepubinstance path to your actual path to this locally cloned gimmepubinstance repo on your laptop/workstation.

   source /path/to/gimmepubinstance/aliases
   

2. Update the gimmeprofile & gimmepath bash variable values within the aliases file to reflect your AWS CLI profile and path to this cloned repo.

   export gimmeprofile=foo                   #<---UPDATE ME
   export gimmepath="$HOME/gimmepubinstance" #<---UPDATE ME
   

3. Now you are ready to create the AWS instance!

   gimmepubinstance
   

4. Clean up the AWS instance and VPC resources created in step 3. when they are no longer needed.

   deletegimmeinstance
   

Instead of using the above Quick Start aliases method to simplify creation of the AWS instance, these commands can manually be run to create the instance. Steps 1 & 2 should work without being modified unless you prefer a different AWS region or have non standard AWS CLI settings.

1. With an editor, update the local gimmepubinstance.tf file provider, backend stanzas with
   1. the path to your AWS credential
   2. desired AWS Region
   3. globally unique S3 bucket name since I already grabbed gimmepubinstance ;)

   provider "aws" {
     shared_credentials_file = "%HOME/.aws/credentials"
     region = "us-east-1"
   }
   terraform {
     backend "s3" {
       bucket = "gimmepubinstance"
       key = "terraform.tfstate"
       region = "us-east-1"
     }
   }
   

2. With an editor, also edit the ./firstrun/main.tf file to match any changes made in the above step 1.

   provider "aws" {
     shared_credentials_file = "%HOME/.aws/credentials"
     region = "us-east-1"
   }
   

3. Run the terraform.
   • NOTE: Because the AWS CLI supports multiple AWS accounts set as different profiles in your ~/.aws/credentials file, you'll need to preface all terraform commands with the AWS_PROFILE=foo string as well as a -var AWS_PROFILE=foo because of a terraform AWS tagging workaround.

   unset AWS_DELEGATION_TOKEN AWS_ACCESS_KEY AWS_SECRET_KEY
   git clone https://github.com/thesystemninjaneer/gimmepubinstance
   cd gimmepubinstance/firstrun
   AWS_PROFILE=foo terraform init .
   AWS_PROFILE=foo terraform apply -auto-approve .
   cd ..
   AWS_PROFILE=foo terraform init .
   AWS_PROFILE=foo terraform apply -auto-approve -var myip=$(curl checkip.amazonaws.com)/32 -var awsprofile=foo .
   pubip=$(AWS_PROFILE=foo terraform output gimmepubinstance_ip|grep [0-9]|cut -f2 -d\")
   ssh centos@$pubip -i $HOME/.ssh/id_rsa
   

This repo uses a tool called Terraform to provision resources in the AWS Cloud. Terraform allows developers to define Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using a HashiCorp created domain specific language abstracted away from any particular cloud providers specific API. This is handy because the same developer IaC definitions can be reused against any Terraform supported IaC providers (e.g. AWS, Azure, OpenStack, ...) and Terraform will worry about translating IaC resource requests to the IaC providers API's.

One of the advantages of using Terraform over other IaC tools is that it supports tracking state of all resources it creates using a single state file. It also supports storing its state in a network location for ease of access/redundancy. When using an AWS S3 bucket to hold the state file, as this repo does, a weird scenario occurs requiring the S3 bucket to exist prior to terraform being able to create any AWS resources which cannot also be managed by Terraform per design decision made by HashiCorp.

To accomplish automated creation of the state bucket, a sub folder holds a terraform file, ./firstrun/main.tf, dedicated to its creation. We don't care about the state of this resource and keep its state local to the folder.

1. gimmepubinstance terraform S3 state bucket. All other resources created by this repo will be saved in a terraform.tfstate file kept in this bucket.

The gimmepubinstance.tf file uses the AWS Terraform Provider to create the following:

1. gimmevpc VPC with a CIDR block 10.100.0.0/16
2. gimmesubnetpub1 public subnet of 10.100.100.0/24 in the above VPC
3. gimmegw internet gateway in the above VPC
4. gimmeroutetable route table with a default route 0.0.0.0/0 attached to the internet gateway created above
5. gimmeacl NACL applied to the above subnet with the following rules
   • ingress
     1. 22/tcp from ip saved in variable myip
     2. 1024-65535/tcp from 0.0.0.0/0
   • egress
     1. 1024-65535/tcp to 0.0.0.0/0
     2. 80/tcp to 0.0.0.0/0
6. ssh-from-gimme-$myip security group
   • ingress
     1. 22/tcp from ip saved in variable myip
   • egresss
     1. all port/protocols to 0.0.0.0/0
7. gimmekeypair SSH keypair based on ~/.ssh/id_rsa.pub local public key
8. gimmeiamrole IAM role dedicated for to launch the gimmepubinstance ec2 instance with
9. gimmepubinstancepolicy IAM policy to attach to the above gimmeiamrole for granting List*,Get*,Put* permissions to the gimmepubinstance ec2 instance for a bucket called gimmepubinstance created by the sub folder runfirst terraform
10. gimmeiamprofile IAM profile needed before the above IAM policy gimmepubinstancepolicy can be attached to the IAM role gimmeiamrole
11. gimmeiamattach attaches the above gimmepubinstancepolicy IAM policy to the gimmeiamrole IAM role
12. gimmepubinstance finally creates the t3a.micro ec2 instance using the latest CentOS AMI in the AWS marketplace and the above created IAM policies/roles/profiles/subnet with a public ip saved in the gimmepubinstance_ip Terraform output variable to reference for ease of later SSH connections