I Built a 3-Tier AWS Architecture With Terraform — Here's What Actually Tripped Me Up

I Built a 3-Tier AWS Architecture With Terraform — Here's What Actually Tripped Me Up I thought I understood Terraform. Then I tried to inject a database endpoint that didn't exist yet into a server that hadn't booted yet, and I stared at my screen for a solid hour. That moment taught me more about Infrastructure as Code than any tutorial had. This is the story of building a production-style 3-tier AWS architecture from scratch — what I built, what broke, and what I'd do differently. Why I Built This I'm on a DevOps learning path at AmaliTech, and I'd been doing the usual things: tutorials, small scripts, single-instance deployments. But I kept noticing that production systems don't look like that. They have layers. They isolate things. The database is never directly reachable from the internet. So I decided to build one — not a toy, but an architecture that actually reflects how real workloads run. The application I chose to deploy on top of it was a Pharma AI assistant: Next.js front