How to set up a new AWS project in under 12 minutes

How to set up a new AWS project in under 12 minutes (without manual clicking) Every DevOps engineer knows this pain: a new project kicks off and you're buried in AWS console tabs, IAM policies, and Terraform boilerplate. The manual process (what it costs) Running through the 10 standard setup steps — account, IAM, VPC, Terraform state, modules, CloudWatch, OIDC, Secrets Manager, test deploy — takes 400+ minutes. Every single time. The real issue: it's identical every time, yet always done manually. Key insight: IAM role assumption > credential storage # trust_policy.json — CI assumes a role, never stores a key { "Version" : "2012-10-17" , "Statement" : [{ "Effect" : "Allow" , "Principal" : { "Federated" : "arn:aws:iam::ACCOUNT_ID:oidc-provider/token.actions.githubusercontent.com" }, "Action" : "sts:AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity" , "Condition" : { "StringEquals" : { "token.actions.githubusercontent.com:sub" : "repo:YOUR_ORG/YOUR_REPO:ref:refs/heads/main" } } }] } No stored credentials. Per-