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.

Create a VPC named datacenter-vpc in region us-east-1 with any IPv4 CIDR block through 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 VPC — `datacenter-vpc`

Create a VPC in us-east-1 with any IPv4 CIDR block.

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"
}

resource "aws_vpc" "datacenter_vpc" {
  cidr_block = "10.0.0.0/16"

  tags = {
    Name = "datacenter-vpc"
  }
}
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 any $ or backticks in HCL reach the file literally rather than being interpreted by bash — the right default whenever writing config files this way.

Note the task says main.tf only — don't split the provider block into a separate provider.tf or versions.tf.

The provider block

region = "us-east-1" — pins the deployment region as required. A VPC is a regional resource, so this determines where it's created.
required_providers with a version constraint keeps terraform init from pulling an unexpected major version.

The `aws_vpc` resource

One resource does the whole job:

cidr_block = "10.0.0.0/16" — the task allows any IPv4 block, so this uses a standard RFC 1918 private range. A /16 gives 65,536 addresses, plenty of room to carve subnets from later. Any valid private CIDR (172.16.0.0/16, 192.168.0.0/24, …) would satisfy the requirement equally; 10.0.0.0/16 is the conventional default.
tags = { Name = "datacenter-vpc" } — this is what "named" means for a VPC. AWS VPCs have no native name field; the console and any grader read the Name tag. Omit the tag and the VPC still exists but shows as unnamed — the most common way to fail this task.

The Terraform resource label (datacenter_vpc) is just the internal identifier used for references within the config; it's unrelated to the AWS-visible name, which comes from the tag.

Verify

aws ec2 describe-vpcs \
  --filters Name=tag:Name,Values=datacenter-vpc \
  --query 'Vpcs[0].{Id:VpcId,Cidr:CidrBlock,Name:Tags[?Key==`Name`]|[0].Value}'

Expected — the VPC ID, CidrBlock: 10.0.0.0/16, and Name: datacenter-vpc.

You can also confirm from Terraform's own state:

terraform state show aws_vpc.datacenter_vpc

If describe-vpcs returns nothing, the Name tag is missing or misspelled — the filter matches on that tag, not on the resource label in the config.

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