Now that we know which problem Terraform solves, we can proceed to learning how exactly it works and how to use it. In this chapter, you will learn a bit about Terraform's history, install it on our workstation, prepare working environment, and run the tool for the first time. After getting everything ready for our work, we will figure out what is a Terraform provider is, and then we will take a quick tour of what AWS and EC2 are.

With this knowledge in place, we will first create an EC2 instance by hand (just to understand the pain that Terraform will eliminate) and then we will do exactly the same with the help of Terraform template. That will allow us to study the nature of Terraform state file. Once we know that, we will update our server using the same template, and finally, destroy it. By the end of the chapter, you will already have a solid knowledge of Terraform basics, and you will be ready to create a template for your existing infrastructure.