Learn Terraform and AWS at Zero Cost with LocalStack: A Complete Practical Guide

November 5, 2025 · 1739 words · 9 min

When learning AWS and Terraform, the biggest pain points are often the high costs of cloud services and the financial risks of misconfigurations. This guide will show you how to use LocalStack to simulate AWS services locally, enabling you to learn and experiment with Terraform Infrastructure as Code (IaC) at zero cost and zero risk.

In this tutorial, we’ll build a complete AWS network architecture including VPC, public/private subnets, Internet Gateway, security groups, and EC2 instances. All resources run in your local LocalStack environment without incurring any AWS charges or security risks from configuration errors.

IRSA vs. EC2 IAM:Usage Scenarios and Permission Management Practices

March 25, 2025 · 724 words · 4 min

In AWS environments, assigning permissions to workloads is critical for security and functionality. For applications running on EC2 or EKS, two common approaches are EC2 IAM Instance Roles and IRSA (IAM Roles for Service Accounts). This article explains what they are, their differences, usage scenarios with code examples, and common issues with solutions, helping the team choose the right authentication method and avoid permission confusion.