Terraform can be used for orchestration & environment setup at scale yet only returns an "All Success" or "A Failure" type result.
This often means failures require deeper inspection and analysis throughout the orchestration process.

• Manifest: this is any file with a .tf ending
• resources: the manifest files contain aws_resource declarations, these are resources.
• configs: these values are specific to an AWS environment and should not be shared. This represents Access/Secret keys, VPC-IDs, subnets or any other data element which can be considered private.

The variables manifest is a template with xxxx values in places where specific data is needed. A few of the values that require updating to use the terraform manifests can also be created dynamically. For the purposes of this wiki, I will outline how to update them via hard-coding:

• access key
• secret key
• vpc_id
• key name
• subnet_id
• security group id (secgroup_id)

Once you have updated the manifest with the appropriate information you can setup git to ignore the recent changes in these files to prevent accidental commit of data:

git update-index --assume-unchanged <file> to start tracking changes again: git update-index --no-assume-unchanged <file>

# ------------------------------------------
# Credentials via API Keys
# ------------------------------------------
variable access_key {
  description = "The API Access key to AWS"
  default="xxxxxxxxx"
}

variable secret_key {
  description = "The API Secret key to AWS"
  default="xxxxxxxxxxxx"
}


provider "aws" {
  access_key = "${var.access_key}"
  secret_key = "${var.secret_key}"
  region = "us-east-2"
}

Once you update the variables manifests you are able to leverage terraform to create, setup, & destroy various AWS services.