Hi there,

Today I am going to take you through the process of setting up Terraform, AWS CLI, and your AWS environment for your DevOps journey.

But honestly… don’t you think there are already way too many tutorials, blogs, and videos about this? Just search “Terraform setup” and watch your screen become instantly messy with suggestions.

It is honestly surprising you clicked this one.

A glass of milk for both you and me

Now, I will not pretend that this guide is magically different from the others. I am just a student DevOps engineer trying to complete a challenge assignment, so forgive me if I sound slightly dramatic along the way.

Still, this is the exact process I followed.

Step 1 — Create an AWS Account

I started by creating an AWS Free Tier account.

A few important things I quickly learned:

Always enable billing alerts or budgets early.

Never casually leave EC2 instances running.

Avoid using the root account for daily activities.

AWS gives enough free resources to learn comfortably, but cloud…