Instances

EC2 is the instance level service offering. We already created an instance when we spun up our Cloud9 environment. Using Terraform, we can create another one very easily. Create the following example.tf file:

resource "aws_instance" "example" {
  ami = "ami-2757f631"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
}
output "id" {
  value = "${aws_instance.example.id}"
}

Run terraform apply. The output will be kept in your state file for future use:

We can easily destroy it with terraform destroy. If you like, you can try it now. Bringing the environments back is as simple as running terraform apply.

One thing to note about terraform destroy is that it can be unreliable in practice, especially if the environment is quite complicated. It pays to check that everything has been torn down successfully after the command has completed.