Practice Set

Q1. An operations team provisions cloud resources by clicking through the console. Environments drift apart, changes are impossible to review before they happen, and rebuilding staging takes days. The team adopts Terraform. Which outcome directly addresses these three problems?

Q2. A company runs workloads on AWS, Azure, and GCP and wants ONE IaC tool and workflow covering all three, using a declarative configuration language. The team shortlists Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, and Bash scripts calling cloud CLIs. Why is Terraform the fit?

Q3. A new team member writing their first Terraform configuration asks: "In what order do I write the steps to create the VPC first, then the subnet, then the instance?" What is the correct answer about how Terraform handles ordering?

Q4. During terraform apply, which component actually makes the API calls that create the EC2 instance in AWS, and which component decides what needs to change?

Q5. A developer clones an existing Terraform repository and immediately runs terraform plan, which fails with errors about missing providers and an uninitialized backend. Which command must be run first in a freshly cloned working directory, and what does it do?

Q6. Before a change window, an engineer wants to see exactly which resources Terraform would create, modify, or destroy — without changing anything — and share that diff with a reviewer. Which command produces this preview?

Q7. A CI pipeline should fail fast if a committed Terraform configuration has syntax errors, missing required arguments, or references to undeclared variables — without contacting any cloud API or needing credentials. Which command belongs in this pipeline stage?

Q8. A temporary performance-testing environment managed by Terraform is no longer needed, and the team wants to remove every resource it manages — after first seeing a list of exactly what would be deleted. Which command sequence is correct?

Q9. A team creates three S3 buckets from a list variable using count = length(var.bucket_names). When they remove the FIRST name from the list, terraform plan wants to destroy and recreate the remaining buckets. Which change prevents this class of problem?

Q10. An application EC2 instance must not start until a VPC endpoint is fully created, but the instance's configuration doesn't reference any attribute of the endpoint — so Terraform sees no dependency between them. How is the ordering enforced?