Building a Windows 2012R2 Instance in AWS with Terraform

Terraform is an application by HashiCorp that is designed to treat infrastructure as code. Lately, I have been working with it to begin automation of resources within AWS, and have been quite pleased. Lets get started with building out a Windows 2012 R2 server with Terraform on AWS. You are going to need to have the following items configured in AWS in order for this to work, as I am not going to be using Terraform to build out these items. Since the purpose of this test is not to create a VPC, subnets, security_groups, etc, all of those will need to be created beforehand. You…

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Terraform vs Cloudformation — First Thoughts

Building out AWS infrastructures by hand is not something that should be taken on lightly. Just as in building out a Data Center or service in any cloud environment (Google, VMWare, etc), building out a bunch of systems by hand is a good way to inherit a bunch of technical debt and a headache or three. On top of that, it is slow and cumbersome to build out servers in a manual fashion, and since it is done manually, it is easy to make mistakes and introduce snowflakes into your environment. Instead, we need to address the build out with automation tooling. There are a number…

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