Step-by-Step Guide to Setting Up Terraform, AWS CLI, and Your AWS Environment

Introduction Welcome to Day 2 of my 30-Day Terraform Challenge journey! Today is all about laying the foundation. As the saying goes, "Measure twice, cut once" — and in the DevOps world, that means setting up your environment correctly before writing a single line of infrastructure code. In this guide, I'll walk you through exactly how I set up my Terraform environment, from creating an AWS account to validating that everything connects properly. Whether you're following along with the challenge or just getting started with Infrastructure as Code, this step-by-step guide will save you hours of troubleshooting. Here is what we are going to accomplish A secure AWS account ready for infrastructure deployment A dedicated IAM user for Terraform (not using root credentials!) Terraform installed and verified on your machine AWS CLI configured and authenticated VS Code set up with essential extensions A fully validated environment with working commands Step 1: AWS Account Setup Creating Your A