My Second Terraform Deployment: Building a Complete AWS Network from Scratch (And What I Learned That Surprised Me)

By Vivian Chiamaka Okose I previously talked about how I learned how to provision a virtual machine on Azure. This present task taught me how networking actually works. That might sound like an exaggeration, but it is not. When you have to build every single layer of a cloud network by hand -- in code -- and watch each piece slot into place before the next one can exist, something clicks that no amount of reading diagrams ever produces. This is the story of my second Terraform deployment: an AWS EC2 instance inside a custom VPC, accessible via SSH, running Nginx. Eight resources, one configuration file, and a few lessons I will carry into every cloud project I work on. What I Built A custom VPC with CIDR 10.0.0.0/16 and DNS support enabled A public subnet ( 10.0.1.0/24 ) in af-south-1a with auto-assign public IP A private subnet ( 10.0.2.0/24 ) in af-south-1b for future backend resources An Internet Gateway attached to the VPC A Route Table routing all outbound traffic through the IGW