00 Orientation
What this stage buys you: you can provision and destroy a real resource in a real cloud account, and explain every file that appeared while doing it.
Three deliberately shallow topics. The stage exists to build a correct skeleton of the whole model
before any detail is loaded onto it, because the most expensive failure in learning Terraform is
memorising syntax on top of an imperative mental model — writing apply as though it were a script
that runs, then spending months confused about why plans propose changes you didn't ask for.
Nothing here is deep. The depth arrives in The Machinery, and it arrives much faster if the skeleton is right.
What you should already know: how to use a terminal, and enough of at least one cloud console to have created something in it by clicking. No prior Terraform. You'll need credentials for at least one of AWS, Azure or GCP, and a billing alert on it.
| # | Topic | What it covers |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Why IaC Exists | Click-ops and how it fails; why shell scripts don't converge; drift as the actual problem; declarative desired state versus imperative steps; where Terraform sits against CloudFormation, Bicep, Pulumi, Ansible and Crossplane |
| 2 | The Core Workflow | init → validate → plan → apply, and destroy; what each command reads and writes; which are safe to run unattended; your first real apply |
| 3 | Anatomy of a Project | The .tf file split as convention rather than rule; .terraform/; the lock file; the state file and the idea behind it; what belongs in git and what absolutely does not |
Rough time: one week, or one evening if you're impatient and already comfortable in a cloud console.