How I Provisioned My First Azure VM with Terraform (And the 5 Errors That Taught Me More Than Any Tutorial)

By Vivian Chiamaka Okose Published on dev.to | Hashnode | Medium Tags: #terraform #azure #devops #iac #beginners #cloud I come from a background in biochemistry and biotechnology. A year ago, "infrastructure" to me meant lab equipment and sample storage. Today, I just provisioned a fully networked Azure virtual machine using nothing but code -- and destroyed it just as cleanly when I was done. This is the story of how that happened, including every error I hit along the way. What Is Terraform and Why Does It Matter? Before I get into the how, let me explain the what. Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool built by HashiCorp. Instead of clicking around in the Azure portal to create resources, you write a configuration file that describes what you want your infrastructure to look like, and Terraform figures out how to make it happen. Every resource, every network setting, every dependency -- all defined in code, all version-controllable, all reproducible. This matters because