Terraform Cloud on AWS Workshop

[nickyoung-hashicorp]

This was the feedback we captured throughout our workshop with Riot Games on 3/6/2020. We call out the sections of the lab to help with pinpointing where to make suggested changes. Overall, the majority of students got through the exercises well and thought it was a great use of time. They were light hearted about some of the minor hiccups, but understand we are working to continue improving the experience.

Terraform Cloud Setup

• The last paragraph saying “Finally, provide your instructor with your organization’s name” should be modified to show customers how to enable the Enterprise features themselves through Settings > Plan & Billing, select Trial Plan, and click the button for “Start your free trial”

Safekeeping Your Terraform State

• “Generate a new token for your workstation” could be more clear, saying something like “Click the button Create an API token .”
• Step 3 saying “Execution Mode set to Local (not Remote) could be broken out into a separate step. A handful (4 out of 13) students ran into “terraform apply” errors about the “variables.tf” file because they glazed over this step.
• One workstation had TF 0.12.20 that stated “terraform login” was an invalid command

Quiz 1 - Terraform State

• Prevent the option to select BOTH “True” and “False”

Securing Cloud Credentials

• Step 5 “Set Terraform Variables for your prefix and region..” We may want to include a specific “region” value. The reason being if the customer happens to choose “us-west-2” (which is common for west coast customers), they might run into the possibility of provisioning to “us-west-2d” causing the following error during a run in TFC (see below). It doesn’t always happen if TFC happens to provision into a valid AZ that has the t2.micro option, but maybe providing instructions for a specific region or modifying the main.tf file could help to avoid this.

  
  aws_instance.hashicat: Creating...
  aws_route_table.hashicat: Creation complete after 1s [id=rtb-0e5d1db14f23afe17]
  aws_route_table_association.hashicat: Creating...
  aws_route_table_association.hashicat: Creation complete after 0s [id=rtbassoc-09d9fe8e3777679d6]

Error: Error launching source instance: Unsupported: Your requested instance type (t2.micro) is not supported in your requested Availability Zone (us-west-2d). Please retry your request by not specifying an Availability Zone or choosing us-west-2a, us-west-2b, us-west-2c. status code: 400, request id: 935ba4ea-72ff-4333-ab50-474f46d0516b

on main.tf line 107, in resource "aws_instance" "hashicat": 107: resource aws_instance "hashicat" {

Working with Teams in Terraform Cloud

- “Your instructor will need to upgrade your organization to a free trial…” could be changed to “You will need to ensure your free trial has been activated from the earlier steps in order to complete this challenge.”

- “Next, assign access rights to the hashicat-aws workspace. Go into the Team Access page of the hashicat-aws workspace settings.”  I’m not sure if this is the nature of how trials are activated, but I had to log out and log back into TFC before I could see the “Team Access” option under the workspace’s settings.

- After “Now that you have created teams you can invite some users to your organization.” append “return to your general Settings and select Users"

Private Module Registry

- Private Module Registry challenge instructs them to add a file locally and commit/push to their repo on github.  This does not work if you have 2FA enabled on GitHub, unless you create a new ssh key (within the Instruqt lab) then register it on GitHub).  Previous exercise instructed them to edit the file directly on GitHub, which avoided this issue, and could be applied for this exercise as well.

[scarolan]

Terraform Cloud setup - Updated with clarity on how to self-enable trials. Also added text on what to do if you've already burned your free trial in an existing account

Safekeeping your terraform state - Added even more emphasis on this step. We now call it out THREE times in the exercise instructions. And I fully expect people still not to read it and smake this mistake. 🤦‍♀

The tf 0.12.20 error is bizarre. The image we use has 0.12.21 baked into it so i have no idea where this person got an older version of terraform

On the quiz page, yes, this is an issue we've brought up with instruqt.

Added warning about running this outside of us-east-1. Tracking this in #70

Updated verbiage to indicate you may need to refresh or log out and back in. "Next, assign access rights to the hashicat-aws workspace. Go into the Team Access page of the hashicat-aws workspace settings. If you don't see the Team Access link you may need to log out and back into Terraform Cloud."

Added clarity on getting back to the Users page.

Instead of ssh keys i added instructions for 2FA users to generate a personal access token. This seems simpler and more straightforward.

[scarolan]

Fixed in #71