Web App Lab

I created this lab as an example for my Hennepin Tech students. The first part of this lab is to create a functioning highly available web application in the AWS Console. The second component of this lab is deploying these same resources with code. The focus and intent of this lab is to familiarize with AWS Console (VPC¹, EC2², S3³) and recognize the advantages of using IaC.

(Part 1) 🪛 Manual Creation - Web App Lab

In this first part of the lab you will use the AWS Console to create all lab resources manually. You will gain hands on experience and learn how to use services like VPC, EC2, and S3. To open and download the full lab guide scroll to the link below.

Creating a Highly Available Web App with AWS - URL

Terraform Variables:

In the terraform.tfvars file you will want to configure the following variables:

Variable Name	Value and Constraints
region	Should be a valid AWS region
org_name	Can be a fake company or just your name for example
env	This is short for environment think: prod, dev, stage, test, etc..
ssh_key_pair	Required for EC2 instances to launch, you need to create this yourself first
instance_type	I try to keep everything free-tier so t3.micro is default
vpc_cidr	This can be any RFC1918, I recommend at least a /23 CIDR to start with
availability_zones	Important! This map is what the looping mechanism is used for. Use valid availability zones and keep the key values as they are (0, 1, 2, etc..)
borrowed_bits	This is what size of subnets you want, by default I've set it to 5 to create /28 CIDRs

Below is another example of the terraform.tfvars file.

#========================#
# Declare Variables Here #
#========================#

# Enter the AWS region to deploy to
# Defaults to us-west-1
region = "us-west-1"

# Between 2 and 20 characters
org_name = "tkdev"

# Environment between 3 and 10 characters
# Could be prod, dev, non-prod
env = "sandbox"

# If you want a pair of servers or not
# Naming convention is pri (primary) or sec (secondary)
# Default value is true

# No default value, fill out
ssh_key_pair = "tkdev-ssh-key"

# VM instance type
instance_type = "t3.micro"

#====================#
# Network Variables  #
#====================#

# /23 supports up to 512 usable IPs
# 192.168.10.1 - 192.168.11.254
vpc_cidr = "192.168.10.0/23"

# AZ list used for naming and looping mechanism
# us-west-1 doesn't have a b
availability_zones = {
    0 = "us-west-1a"
    1 = "us-west-1c"
}

# How many subnets to create
# This should match the availability_zones


# What size of network you want
# 5 is a /28
borrowed_bits = 5

Resources Created:

This demo creates the following resources in the following order:

1. VPC
2. Subnets based on what is defined in terraform.tfvars
3. IGW attached to the VPC
4. Default route table that points 0.0.0.0/0 to the IGW
5. Security Group that allows 80 and 22 TCP inbound from anywhere (lock this down for further security)
6. EIPs based on how many zones you've defined (default is 2)
7. EC2 Instance(s) with Amazon Linux based on how many zones you've defined (default is 2)
8. S3 bucket with some randomly generated characters (optionally can use this for logging on the ALB)

References:

Reference	Description
for_each Meta Argument	Official Hashicorp Documentation for the for_each Meta-Argument
lookup Function	Official Hashicorp Documentation for the lookup function
cidrsubnet Function	Official Hashicorp Documentation for the cidrsubnet function
random_string	Official Terraform Registry for random provider

Disclaimer

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Footnotes

1. In this lab we specifically build many components with the VPC service: VPC Reference ↩

2. In this lab we we create an ALB and EC2 instances with the EC2 service: EC2 Reference ↩

3. In this lab we create an S3 bucket with the S3 service: S3 Reference ↩