Terraform & Terragrunt for AWS — From Zero to Hero

Terraform is a declarative infrastructure-as-code tool: you describe the cloud resources you want in HCL, and Terraform figures out how to make reality match — creating, updating, or destroying resources as needed. This course is written for developers — people who write and review Terraform changes, manage state across a team, and have to make infrastructure changes safely in production.

Every example in this course targets AWS, using real resource types (aws_instance, aws_s3_bucket, aws_iam_role, and so on) and a real S3 remote backend — the HCL syntax, state model, and Terragrunt concepts you learn transfer directly to any other provider; only the resource type names and backend configuration change. Where current practice recently shifted — like S3’s native state locking replacing the older DynamoDB-based approach, or Terragrunt’s run --all command replacing the deprecated run-all/plan-all — this course teaches the current, correct form and says so explicitly, since a lot of existing tutorials online have not caught up.

What this course covers

Module	You will learn
Foundations	Infrastructure as Code, HCL syntax, providers and resources, the dependency graph, the Terraform workflow
State Management	The state file, remote backends and locking, drift detection and import, sensitive data in state
Variables & Data Flow	Input variables, outputs and locals, expressions and functions, count vs for_each
Modules	Writing reusable modules, composition and sources, versioning, testing with terraform test
Multi-Environment	The dev/staging/prod problem, Terraform workspaces, directory-per-environment, why Terragrunt exists
Terragrunt Fundamentals	root.hcl, DRY configuration with include, dependency blocks between units, running many units at once
Production & Ecosystem	CI/CD for infrastructure, policy as code and static analysis, secrets and credentials, a production checklist

How to read it

Each lesson opens with the idea in one sentence, shows real HCL and CLI commands, has a diagram of the moving parts, and ends with a one-line takeaway plus a short quiz. Work top to bottom — later modules assume the resource, state, and dependency-graph vocabulary from these first lessons.

🏗️ The one-line takeaway

Terraform is declarative infrastructure as code: you describe desired AWS resources in HCL, and Terraform plans and applies the changes needed to get there, tracking everything in state. This course teaches Terraform and Terragrunt from a developer’s seat — the workflow, the guarantees, and the production behavior — starting from HCL itself.