Developer Documents Real AWS Terraform Failures During a Five-Week IaC Course

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A developer enrolled in a structured five-week Terraform course set out to build a complete AWS network — including a VPC, subnets, an EC2 instance, and a security group — using only infrastructure-as-code. The project hit immediate obstacles, starting with a 403 IAM permissions error caused by an unconfigured EC2 policy, compounded by the developer accidentally working across two AWS accounts simultaneously. A subsequent 400 error revealed that newer AWS accounts in the ca-central-1 region cannot use the commonly documented t2.micro instance type and must instead use t3.micro. The developer used these failures to highlight a practical debugging distinction: 403 errors signal permission denials, while 400 errors indicate invalid requests. The honest account underscores that misreading error messages and environment mismatches are among the most common early pitfalls in cloud infrastructure work.

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