Terraform Azure Cloud Lab — Philip Fleischer

Infrastructure as Code lab using Terraform and Azure, covering providers, resources, state management, variables, outputs, planning, deployment, and teardown workflows.

A structured lab for learning Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform against the Azure cloud provider. The repository follows a progression from basic resource provisioning to multi-module, variable-driven deployments.

What this covers

Terraform fundamentals

Provider configuration for azurerm, authentication via service principal and environment variables
Understanding Terraform’s three-stage workflow: plan → apply → destroy
State management — local state vs. remote state in Azure Blob Storage, state locking, and why shared state is critical for team environments
terraform.tfstate inspection and the risks of manual state edits

Resource provisioning

Virtual Networks and Subnets — VNet address spaces, NSG rules, peering
Virtual Machines — Linux VMs with cloud-init scripts, SSH key authentication, public IP assignment
Storage accounts — blob containers, access tiers, lifecycle management policies
Azure Container Registry — building and pushing Docker images for deployment

Variable-driven configuration

variables.tf with type constraints, default values, and validation rules
terraform.tfvars for environment-specific overrides (dev/staging/prod separation)
outputs.tf to expose resource IDs and endpoints for use in downstream steps

Modules and reusability

Extracting repeated patterns (e.g., “VM + NIC + NSG”) into reusable local modules
Module source referencing and version pinning

Why IaC matters

The core lesson from this lab: infrastructure that isn’t code is infrastructure that can’t be reviewed, diffed, or reproduced reliably. Terraform’s declarative model makes the gap between “what I think I deployed” and “what is actually deployed” visible.