Capstone — Build a Stack from a Brief
This is the finish line for the foundations track. No hand-holding this time: you'll build a small, complete stack from a written brief — the way a real ticket arrives — using everything you've learned. Variables, a resource graph, and outputs, applied and verified.
When the checks pass, you've got a genuine Terraform project worth showing an interviewer or dropping into your portfolio.
Interview prep
A capstone you can talk through is worth more than a dozen tutorials you watched — be ready to walk an interviewer through this stack.
Walk me through the structure of a basic Terraform configuration.
Inputs at the top as variable blocks; the resource blocks that make up the stack, wired together with references so the dependency graph (and creation order) is implicit; and output blocks at the end exposing the values a consumer needs — typically computed attributes like IDs or IPs. Run plan to preview, apply to converge, and the state file records what was built.
Why parameterize with variables and expose outputs instead of hard-coding everything?
Variables make a config reusable across environments without editing the body, and they keep changeable values in one place. Outputs are the documented return values — they let a human, a script, or a parent module consume what the stack produced (an IP, an ARN) without reaching into its internals. Together they turn a one-off snippet into a reusable, composable module.