Terraform Certified Associate with AWS — Lesson 3: IAM, Storage, Remote State, and Collaboration Controls

Technical Scope

• IAM roles, policies, and least privilege
• S3 resources and encryption settings
• Remote state with locking and environment isolation
• Sensitive values, state exposure, and operational access

Instructor Demonstration

Create a workload role and secure remote-state architecture.

Applied Workshop

Write an IAM policy boundary for a Terraform-managed application component.

1. Translate the scenario into configuration, access, state, pipeline, or module decisions.
2. Implement the change in a controlled workspace or repository.
3. Capture the plan, logs, outputs, policy results, and post-change checks.
4. Explain one safer or more maintainable alternative and its trade-off.

Validation Standard

Permissions are scoped, storage is protected, and state operations are serialized.

• The intended target, identity, environment, and state boundary are confirmed.
• The plan or execution evidence contains no unexplained destructive action.
• Security, reliability, maintainability, and operational ownership are reviewed.
• The final result can be reproduced from version-controlled inputs.

Failure Analysis

Fix policy syntax, denied actions, bucket constraints, state locking, and backend migration.

Learners isolate the smallest verified cause, correct it, rerun the relevant validation step, and record the preventive action in the course improvement log.