Assignment

The Nautilus DevOps team is strategizing the migration of a portion of their infrastructure to the AWS cloud. Recognizing the scale of this undertaking, they have opted to approach the migration in incremental steps rather than as a single massive transition. To achieve this, they have segmented large tasks into smaller, more manageable units. This granular approach enables the team to execute the migration in gradual phases, ensuring smoother implementation and minimizing disruption to ongoing operations. By breaking down the migration into smaller tasks, the Nautilus DevOps team can systematically progress through each stage, allowing for better control, risk mitigation, and optimization of resources throughout the migration process.

Use Terraform to create a security group under the default VPC with the following requirements:

The name of the security group must be nautilus-sg.
The description must be Security group for Nautilus App Servers.
Add an inbound rule of type HTTP, with a port range of 80, and source CIDR range 0.0.0.0/0.
Add another inbound rule of type SSH, with a port range of 22, and source CIDR range 0.0.0.0/0.

Ensure that the security group is created in the us-east-1 region using Terraform. The Terraform working directory is /home/bob/terraform. Create the main.tf file (do not create a different .tf file) to accomplish this task.

Note: Right-click under the EXPLORER section in VS Code and select Open in Integrated Terminal to launch the terminal.

Solution

Terraform Security Group — `nautilus-sg`

Create a security group in the default VPC in us-east-1 with HTTP and SSH inbound rules open to the world.

Create `main.tf` (heredoc → file)

cd /home/bob/terraform

cat > main.tf <<'EOF'
terraform {
  required_providers {
    aws = {
      source  = "hashicorp/aws"
      version = "~> 6.0"
    }
  }
}

provider "aws" {
  region = "us-east-1"
}

# Look up the existing default VPC
data "aws_vpc" "default" {
  default = true
}

resource "aws_security_group" "nautilus_sg" {
  name        = "nautilus-sg"
  description = "Security group for Nautilus App Servers"
  vpc_id      = data.aws_vpc.default.id

  ingress {
    description = "HTTP"
    from_port   = 80
    to_port     = 80
    protocol    = "tcp"
    cidr_blocks = ["0.0.0.0/0"]
  }

  ingress {
    description = "SSH"
    from_port   = 22
    to_port     = 22
    protocol    = "tcp"
    cidr_blocks = ["0.0.0.0/0"]
  }

  egress {
    from_port   = 0
    to_port     = 0
    protocol    = "-1"
    cidr_blocks = ["0.0.0.0/0"]
  }

  tags = {
    Name = "nautilus-sg"
  }
}
EOF

How to run

cd /home/bob/terraform
terraform init
terraform apply -auto-approve

How it works

The heredoc

cat > main.tf <<'EOF' writes the file in one shot. The quoted 'EOF' disables shell expansion, so $ and backticks in the HCL reach the file literally. The task requires everything in main.tf — don't split the provider block into a separate file.

Finding the default VPC

data "aws_vpc" "default" {
  default = true
}

A data source reads an existing resource rather than creating one. Setting default = true selects the account's default VPC for the region, and data.aws_vpc.default.id then feeds the security group's vpc_id.

This is deliberately a data source, not a resource. The aws_default_vpc resource would adopt the default VPC into Terraform state and let Terraform modify (or on destroy, orphan) it — far more intrusive than needed. Reading it keeps Terraform's ownership limited to the security group itself.

The security group

name = "nautilus-sg" — the group name, exactly as required.
description — required by AWS on every security group (Terraform defaults it to "Managed by Terraform" if omitted). Important: the description is immutable — AWS won't let you change it after creation. If you apply with the wrong text, you must destroy and recreate the group, so get it right the first time.
vpc_id — pins the group to the default VPC per the requirement.

The ingress rules

Each ingress block is one inbound rule:

Requirement	`protocol`	`from_port` / `to_port`	`cidr_blocks`
HTTP	`tcp`	80 / 80	`0.0.0.0/0`
SSH	`tcp`	22 / 22	`0.0.0.0/0`

The "type" the task refers to (HTTP, SSH) is a console-level label, not an API field. AWS derives it from the protocol/port combination — tcp + port 80 is HTTP, tcp + port 22 is SSH. That's why there's no type argument in the HCL; setting the right protocol and ports is what makes the console display those names. The description field here is just a human-readable label and doesn't affect matching.

from_port and to_port define a range; setting both to the same value expresses a single port. 0.0.0.0/0 means any source IPv4 address.

Security note: opening SSH (22) to 0.0.0.0/0 is fine for a lab but poor practice in production, where you'd restrict it to a bastion host or known CIDR.

The egress rule

  egress {
    from_port   = 0
    to_port     = 0
    protocol    = "-1"
    cidr_blocks = ["0.0.0.0/0"]
  }

protocol = "-1" means all protocols, and with ports 0/0 this is the standard allow-all outbound rule. It's included because when Terraform manages a security group with no egress block, it strips AWS's default allow-all outbound rule, leaving the group unable to initiate any outbound traffic. The task doesn't ask about egress, so preserving the normal default is the sane choice.

Verify

aws ec2 describe-security-groups \
  --filters Name=group-name,Values=nautilus-sg \
  --query 'SecurityGroups[0].{Name:GroupName,Desc:Description,Vpc:VpcId,Ingress:IpPermissions[*].{Proto:IpProtocol,From:FromPort,To:ToPort,Cidr:IpRanges[0].CidrIp}}'

Expected — GroupName: nautilus-sg, the exact description string, the default VPC's ID, and two ingress entries: tcp 80→80 0.0.0.0/0 and tcp 22→22 0.0.0.0/0.

If the description is wrong, terraform apply cannot fix it in place — run terraform destroy -target=aws_security_group.nautilus_sg and re-apply with the corrected text.

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