Looking at what we are Building

So now that you have a basic understanding of how Terraform works, before you start running any terraform command against a real AWS account, two things need to happen: you need an identity Terraform can authenticate as, and you need a mental picture of what you're about to create, so the plan output in Part 4 isn't just a list of unfamiliar resource names. Never Use Your AWS Root User! The root user (the email/password you signed up to AWS with) can do anything, including closing the account. It should basically never be used day-to-day. Instead, create a dedicated IAM user just for this project. In real life you would create a dedicated IAM user for your CI/CD pipeline to automate deployments: AWS Console → IAM → Users → Create user (e.g. terraform-voting-app). Do not enable AWS Console access, this user only needs programmatic access, i.e. an API key pair. The AWS managed policy AdministratorAccess is the path of least friction, and is what you should use for the