Creating multiple AWS EC2 instances is generally the need of the project or the organization when you are asked to create dozens of AWS EC2 machines in a particular AWS account, and using AWS console will take hours to do that why not automate it using Terraform and save your hours of hard work?

There are various automated ways that can create multiple instances quickly, but automating with Terraform is way easier and more fun.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to Launch multiple AWS EC2 instances on AWS using Terraform count and Terraform for_each. Let’s dive in.

Table of Content

1. What is Amazon EC2 instance?
2. Prerequisites
3. Terraform files and Terraform directory structure
4. Launch multiple EC2 instances using Terraform count
5. Launch multiple EC2 instances using Terraform for_each
6. Conclusion

What is Amazon EC2 instance?

Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2) provides the scalable capacity in the Amazon Web Services (AWS) Cloud. With AWS EC2, you don’t need to worry about the hardware and time to develop and deploy applications on the machines.

You can use Amazon EC2 to launch as many or as few virtual servers as you need, configure security and networking, and manage storage. Amazon EC2 enables you to scale up or down the computations such as memory or CPU when needed. Also, AWS EC2 instances are safe as initially, they grant access to them using SSH keys.

Prerequisites

• Ubuntu machine 20.04 version would be great , if you don’t have any machine you can create a AWS EC2 instance on AWS account with recommended 4GB RAM and at least 5GB of drive space.
• Ubuntu machine should have IAM role attached with full access to create AWS secrets in the AWS Secret Manager or administrator permissions.
• Terraform installed on the Ubuntu Machine. Refer How to Install Terraform on an Ubuntu machine.

You may incur a small charge for creating an EC2 instance on Amazon Managed Web Service.

Terraform files and Terraform directory structure

Now that you have Terraform installed. Let’s now dive into Terraform files and Terraform directory structure that will help you write the Terraform configuration files later in this tutorial.

Terraform code, that is, Terraform configuration files, are written in a tree-like structure to ease the overall understanding of code with .tf format or .tf.json or .tfvars format. These configuration files are placed inside the Terraform modules.

Terraform modules are on the top level in the hierarchy where configuration files reside. Terraform modules can further call another child to terraform modules from local directories or anywhere in disk or Terraform Registry.

Terraform contains mainly five files as main.tf , vars.tf , providers.tf , output.tf and terraform.tfvars.

1. main.tf – Terraform main.tf file contains the main code where you define which resources you need to build, update or manage.
2. vars.tf – Terraform vars.tf file contains the input variables which are customizable and defined inside the main.tf configuration file.
3. output.tf : The Terraform output.tf file is the file where you declare what output paraeters you wish to fetch after Terraform has been executed that is after terraform apply command.
4. .terraform: This directory contains cached provider , modules plugins and also contains the last known backend configuration. This is managed by terraform and created after you run terraform init command.
5. terraform.tfvars files contains the values which are required to be passed for variables that are refered in main.tf and actually decalred in vars.tf file.
6. providers.tf – The povider.tf is the most important file whrere you define your terraform providers such as terraform aws provider, terraform azure provider etc to authenticate with the cloud provider.

Launch multiple EC2 instances using Terraform count

Another special argument is Terraform count. By default, terraform create a single resource defined in Terraform resource block. But at times, you want to manage multiple objects of the same kind, such as creating four AWS EC2 instances of the same type in the AWS cloud without writing a separate block for each instance. Let’s learn how to use Terraform count meta argument.

This demonstration will create multiple AWS EC2 instances using Terraform count. So let’s create all the Terraform configuration files required to create multiple AWS EC2 instances on the AWS account.

• Log in to the Ubuntu machine using your favorite SSH client.
• Create a folder in opt directory named terraform-demo and switch to this folder. This terraform-demo folder will contain all the configuration files that Terraform needs.

mkdir /opt/terraform-demo
cd /opt/terraform-demo

• Create main.tf file in the /opt/terraform-demo directory and copy/paste the content below. The below code creates the four identical AWS EC2 instances in AWS account using Terraform count meta argument.

resource "aws_instance" "my-machine" {
   count = 4   # Here we are creating identical 4 machines. 
   ami = var.ami
   instance_type = var.instance_type
   tags = {
      Name = "my-machine-${count.index}"
           }
}

• Create another file named vars.tf file in the /opt/terraform-demo directory and copy/paste the content below. The vars.tf file contains all the variables that you reffered in the main.tf file.

# Creating a Variable for ami
variable "ami" {       
  type = string
}

# Creating a Variable for instance_type
variable "instance_type" {    
  type = string
}

• Create another file named terraform.tfvars file in the /opt/terraform-demo directory and copy/paste the content below. The terraform.tfvars file contains all the values that are needed by variables declared in the var.tf file.

 ami = "ami-0742a572c2ce45ebf"
 instance_type = "t2.micro"

• Create one more file named outputs.tf inside the /opt/terraform-demo directory and copy/paste the below content. This file contains all the outputs variables that will be used to display he output after running the terraform apply command.

output "ec2_machines" {
 # Here * indicates that there are more than one arn because count is 4   
  value = aws_instance.my-machine.*.arn 
}
 

• Create another file and name it as provider.tf. This file allows Terraform to interact with AWS cloud using AWS API.

provider "aws" {
  region = "us-east-2"
}

• Now your folder should have all files as shown below and should look like.

• Now your files and code are ready for execution. Initialize the terraform using the terraform init command.

terraform init

• Terraform initialized successfully , now its time to run the plan command which provides you the details of the deployment. Run terraform plan command to confirm if correct resources is going to provisioned or deleted.

terraform plan

• After verification, now its time to actually deploy the code using terraform apply command.

terraform apply

Terraform commands terraform init→ terraform plan→ terraform apply All executed successfully. But it is important to manually verify all the four AWS instances launched in AWS.

• Open your favorite web browser and navigate to the AWS Management Console and log in.
• While in the Console, click on the search bar at the top, search for ‘EC2’, and click on the EC2 menu item and you should see four EC2 instances.

Launch multiple EC2 instances using Terraform for_each

In the previous example, you created more than four AWS instances, but all the instances contain the same attributes such as instance_type, ami, etc. But if you need to create multiple instances with different attributes, such as one instance with t2.medium and others with t2.micro types, you should consider using Terraform for_each.

Assuming you are still logged into the Ubuntu machine using your favorite SSH client.

• Create a folder in opt directory named terraform-for_each-demo and switch to this folder. This terraform-for_each-demo folder will contain all the configuration files that Terraform needs.

mkdir /opt/terraform-for_each-demo
cd /opt/terraform-for_each-demo

• Create main.tf file in the /opt/terraform-for_each-demo directory and copy/paste the content below. The below code creates the two AWS EC2 instances with different instance_type in AWS account using Terraform for_each argument.

resource "aws_instance" "my-machine" {
  ami = var.ami
  for_each  = {                     # for_each iterates over each key and values
      key1 = "t2.micro"             # Instance 1 will have key1 with t2.micro instance type
      key2 = "t2.medium"            # Instance 2 will have key2 with t2.medium instance type
        }
        instance_type  = each.value
	key_name       = each.key
    tags =  {
	   Name  = each.value
	}
}

• Create another file vars.tf file in the /opt/terraform-for_each-demo directory and copy/paste the content below.

variable "tag_ec2" {
  type = list(string)
  default = ["ec21a","ec21b"]
}
                                           
variable "ami" {       # Creating a Variable for ami
  type = string
}

• Create another file terraform.vars file in the /opt/terraform-for_each-demo directory and copy/paste the content below.

ami = "ami-0742a572c2ce45ebf"
instance_type = "t2.micro"

• Now that you have all the Terraform configurations read for execution.
• Next initialize the Terraform using terraform init command followed by terraform plan and finally terraform apply to deploy the changes.

terraform init 
terraform plan
terraform apply

Conclusion

Terraform is a great open-source tool that provides the easiest code and configuration files to work with. Now that you know how to launch multiple AWS EC2 instances on AWS using Terraform count and Terraform for_each on Amazon Web Service.

So which argument do you plan to use in your next Terraform deployment?