Beginner’s Guide to Terraform Course Syllabus

A comprehensive, lab-driven guide to Terraform that takes you from your first resource to reusable modules and full CI/CD automation with confidence. This course spans 8 modules, each designed to be completed in approximately 1 week, with a total time commitment of 40–60 hours. Through hands-on labs and real-world scenarios, you’ll build foundational skills in infrastructure as code, state management, modular design, and collaboration workflows.

Module 1: Introduction to Terraform & IaC

Estimated time: 8 hours

• IaC benefits and use cases
• Comparison of Terraform with other infrastructure tools
• Terraform installation and setup
• CLI basics: terraform init, plan, apply, and destroy

Module 2: Writing Your First Configuration

Estimated time: 8 hours

• HCL syntax fundamentals
• Declaring providers and resources
• Configuring basic resource attributes
• Deploying an AWS EC2 instance via Terraform

Module 3: Variables, Outputs & State Management

Estimated time: 8 hours

• Using input variables with types and defaults
• Defining outputs for resource consumption
• Local vs. remote state storage
• Configuring S3 backend with state locking

Module 4: Resource Dependencies & Provisioners

Estimated time: 8 hours

• Implicit and explicit resource dependencies
• Using depends_on for dependency control
• Local-exec and remote-exec provisioners
• Bootstrapping EC2 instances with remote-exec

Module 5: Modules & Code Organization

Estimated time: 8 hours

• Creating reusable Terraform modules
• Using modules from the Terraform Registry
• Versioning and calling modules
• Designing input and output interfaces for modules

Module 6: Terraform Workspaces & Environment Management

Estimated time: 8 hours

• Using workspaces for environment isolation
• Naming strategies for environments
• Managing configuration variations across dev and prod
• Deploying infrastructure per workspace

Module 7: Terraform Best Practices & Testing

Estimated time: 8 hours

• Code formatting with terraform fmt
• Configuration validation and linting
• Security scanning of Terraform code
• Introduction to Terratest with Go

Module 8: Collaboration & CI/CD Integration

Estimated time: 10 hours

• Remote state locking for team collaboration
• Overview of Terraform Cloud and Enterprise
• Integrating Terraform with GitHub Actions
• Automating plan and apply workflows on merge

Prerequisites

• Familiarity with cloud computing concepts
• Basic understanding of AWS services
• Experience with command-line interfaces

What You'll Be Able to Do After

• Write and manage infrastructure as code using HCL
• Provision and manage cloud resources across environments
• Organize configurations using reusable, versioned modules
• Implement secure and collaborative workflows with remote state
• Automate infrastructure deployments using CI/CD pipelines