Implement Two-Tier Architecture in AWS with Terraform

Cloud Infrastructure Architect

DevOps Engineer

Technical Writer

AWS

AWS VPC

Terraform

ℹ️Synopsis

Hi folks, this is Ankit jodhani, a DevOps enginner, I recently graduated from university and currently exploring and learning DevOps and cloud with AWS. In this project, I'm going to implement 2 tier architecture using Terraform which should be highly available and scalable. so to achieve that we gonna use the following list of services of AWS. you can use any cloud provider that you like. in my case it is AWS.

📃 list of services

Amazon Certificate Manager (SSL)

Amazon Route 53 (DNS service)

Amazon CloudFront(CND)

Amazon EC2 (Server)

Amazon Auto Scaling group (Scale on demand)

Amazon VPC (Virtual private cloud: Private Network)

Amazon RDS (Relational database services: Database)

Amazon DynamoDB (State-locking for testate file)

Amazon S3 (storing backend and achieving versioning)

Amazon CloudWatch (Alarm when CPU utilization increase or decreases)

so let's get started.

💡Plan of execution

What is two-tire architecture

Architecture of project

Local setup

IAM secret key setup

Write terraform file

Outputs

Resources

🏠Two-tire architecture

Two-tier architecture, also known as client-server architecture, is a software design pattern that divides an application into two main parts or tiers: the client tier and the server tier. Each tier has specific responsibilities and interacts with each other to provide functionality to end-users.

🏡Architecture

Let's see the architecture of today's project. we are going to follow a goal-driven approach that helps us to put in minimum effort and gain lots of results. it's very important to understand what we are going to build and to understand you can follow the below architecture. I request you please go through it once. it helps you a lot while building this project.

🖥️Local setup

VS Code

Terraform Install

AWS CLI

🚨 IAM secret key

I hope you have installed all the software and tools. now it's time to open the AWS console. please head over to IAM service.

Create USER

Create a secret key.

Configure AWS-CLI

✍️ Write Terraform files

Finally, it's time to write your infrastructure. but before you jump on it. let me clarify a few things, we are going to best practices while writing code.

🤩Best practices

store state files on remote location

try to keep versioning for backups

state-locking so that we can keep tfstate file consistent while working on a collaborative project

use VCS like git and github

follow modular approach

NOTE: You will get all the code and files on my GitHub repository and I'll share the link with you at the END of the blog. but let me share a few things that you need to take care of while writing code in the backend.tf file.

book_shop_app/backend.tf

terraform {

  backend "s3" {

    bucket = "BUCKET_NAME"

    key    = "backend/FILE_NAME_TO_STORE_STATE.tfstate"

    region = "us-east-1"

    dynamodb_table = "dynamoDB_TABLE_NAME"

  }

}

Create one file with the name of terraform.tfvars in the project directory.

book_shop_app/terraform.tfvars

REGION                  = ""

PROJECT_NAME            = ""

VPC_CIDR                = ""

PUB_SUB_1_A_CIDR        = ""

PUB_SUB_2_B_CIDR        = ""

PRI_SUB_3_A_CIDR        = ""

PRI_SUB_4_B_CIDR        = ""

PRI_SUB_5_A_CIDR        = ""

PRI_SUB_6_B_CIDR        = ""

DB_USERNAME             = ""

DB_PASSWORD             = ""

CERTIFICATE_DOMAIN_NAME = ""

ADDITIONAL_DOMAIN_NAME  = ""