# Introduction to Terraform **URL:** https://forum.networklessons.com/t/introduction-to-terraform/52310 **Category:** Lessons Discussion **Created:** [September 25, 2024, 12:02pm UTC](https://forum.networklessons.com/t/introduction-to-terraform/52310 "2024-09-25T12:02:54Z") **Posts on this page:** 1 **Showing post:** 5
### Author: ![lagapidis](https://cdn-forum.networklessons.com/user_avatar/forum.networklessons.com/lagapidis/32/4949_2.png) [@lagapidis](https://forum.networklessons.com/u/lagapidis) #### Post date: [March 13, 2025, 5:59am UTC](https://forum.networklessons.com/t/introduction-to-terraform/52310/5 "2025-03-13T05:59:58Z")
Hello Ahmedlmad > [@ahmedamrici](#): > > Could you please explain what is AWS EC2 is it virtual machine or some component of VM or what exactly ? AWS EC2 refers to Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud, which is part of Amazon’s cloud-computing platform, Amazon Web Services (AWS). Specifically, the EC2 is a VM that you can configure and “rent” based on the resources that you specify, and you can run your own applications on. More info about this can be found here: > **[Amazon EC2 - Cloud Compute Capacity - AWS](https://aws.amazon.com/ec2/)** > > Amazon EC2 provides secure, resizable compute in the cloud, offering the broadest choice of processor, storage, networking, OS, and purchase model. Now, Rene, in his video, has shown two windows, one with Terraform and one with Visual Studio. Both of these run locally on the windows machine. As far as Terraform goes, when you define the resources you want, that’s when you specify how to connect to an AWS EC2 instance. This is done within the main.tf file. You must also download the required provider plugin using the Terraform init command using that info in the main.tf file. Once that’s done, then your Terraform terminal is connected to your AWS resource. This is all shown within the lesson. Now how about the interaction between Visual Studio and Terraform? VS Code is simply used to edit the Terraform config files (.tf files). There’s no direct integration or communication between the programs. VS Code is simply used as an editor. Does that make sense? If you try out the lab and perform the steps one by one it should become clearer as to how this works and how the various parts interact. I hope this has been helpful! Laz --- _[View the full topic](https://forum.networklessons.com/t/introduction-to-terraform/52310)._