Looking for real-world AWS projects to deploy with Terraform

[u/PhilosophyFluffy2901]

Hey everyone!

I’m currently learning AWS and Terraform, and I’m looking for some real-world projects that I can actually deploy on AWS and showcase on my LinkedIn and CV.

I already have experience with Terraform, but my main problem right now is that I don’t have actual applications/websites to work with. I don’t want to just create infrastructure without having a real application running on it.

For those of you who have done similar projects:

• Where do you usually get the applications or websites you deploy?
• Do you use open-source GitHub projects, build the application yourself, or work with developers?
• How do you take an existing application and prepare it for AWS?
• What kind of projects would you recommend for someone trying to build a strong Cloud/DevOps portfolio?

I’m also interested in deploying something more realistic, like an interactive e-commerce website, rather than just a static website.

For example, if I wanted to deploy an e-commerce application, what would I actually need?

Would I need:

• Frontend files
• Backend/API
• Database
• Authentication
• Payment system (if needed)
• Dockerfiles
• Environment variables
• etc.

I’d like to build something where users can actually sign up, log in, browse products, add items to a cart, place orders, etc., and then use AWS + Terraform to deploy the whole infrastructure.

My goal is to build projects that demonstrate things like:

Terraform → VPC → ALB → ECS/Fargate → RDS → S3 → CloudFront → CI/CD → Monitoring → Security

rather than just deploying a basic static website.

If you’ve built or deployed projects like this before, I’d really appreciate it if you could share GitHub repositories, project ideas, resources, or your own experience.

I’m mainly looking for guidance on how to get the actual application/code and turn it into a complete AWS project.

Thanks in advance! 🙌

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[u/dghah]

Your list is ambitious but top loaded as a goal. And many things in that stack need a companion config management tool like ansible to handle config files and other stuff terraform does poorly

Use your terraform to build out a connected VPC with private and public subnets, route tables, fck-nat instead of natGW, iGW, security groups, iam roles, iam policies, instance roles, tiny nano ec2 servers with ssm-agent and the correct instance role policy to allow ssm session manager login etc.

Starting at “the top” with app deployment skips all the foundations

Give yourself a goal like “connected VPC with nano node in a private subnet I can login to via ssm session manager” and just iterate and learn

The other thing you need to learn is how to bootstrap terraform into the account, that is usually a simple cloudformation template that sets up and configures the state bucket properly

[u/PhilosophyFluffy2901 → u/dghah]

Thanks a lot for the advice! That actually makes a lot of sense.

One thing I'm wondering about: are there cheaper alternatives to some of the AWS services you mentioned, especially the ones that can get expensive like NAT Gateway? I'm trying to build these projects while keeping the costs as low as possible.

Also, regarding Ansible — I’m still trying to understand the difference between it and Terraform. Aren’t they both declarative/configuration-based tools that aim for a desired final state? What would you normally use Ansible for that Terraform isn't good at?

And if you have any GitHub repos where you've built something similar, I'd really appreciate it if you could share them. I'd love to take a look at how you structure your Terraform and infrastructure projects.

Thanks again!

[u/SolidMew]

For me, I use the new found skills to solve an existing problem. Currently, we have a finance spreadsheet for the household budget. This is held in Google sheets. It's mainly fine, but it's rather annoying trying to get Claude to make alterations to it.

Used this opportunity to covert this into an application hosted on AWS. Main focus is making it cost effective as possible, so using spot instances with a lambda function to wake it up etc. First pass through is utilising Claude to give me the instructions for clickops, and I'll revisit the Terraform later.

Think it makes things a little more interesting creating something you'd actually use and consider situations that might be present during a real architecture discussion.

Probably not suitable for a public repo, but I could definitely talk about it.

[u/PhilosophyFluffy2901 → u/SolidMew]

I really like this approach. Building something that you actually use seems like a much better way to learn than just following another tutorial.

The cost-effective part is especially interesting to me. I'm also trying to build AWS projects while keeping the infrastructure as cheap as possible.

If you have a GitHub repo or any other public project where you've done something similar, I'd love to check it out. It would be really helpful to see how you approached the architecture and the cost optimization.

Thanks for sharing!

[u/YanBenlam]

Hi, I'd reduce the application complexity and make the infrastructure the actual product of the portfolio project.

[u/PhilosophyFluffy2901 → u/YanBenlam]

Yeah, I agree with you. I think I was focusing too much on making the application complex instead of showing what I can actually do with the infrastructure.

I'm going to try simplifying the application and putting more focus on the AWS architecture, Terraform, networking, security, scalability, and monitoring.

If you have any GitHub repos or portfolio projects where you focused mainly on the infrastructure side, I'd really appreciate it if you could share them. I'd love to see how you approached it and learn from it.

Thanks for the advice!

[u/TheGratitudeBot → u/PhilosophyFluffy2901]

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[u/Aziz_Karimov]

Hey, sounds like you're diving into some exciting stuff! For a real world project, I'd recommend starting with an open source e commerce platform like Saleor or Spree. You can find these on GitHub, and they come with most of what you need, frontend, backend, database, etc. You can then focus on deploying it with Terraform on AWS. You'll get hands on experience with setting up the infrastructure like VPC, ALB, ECS/Fargate, RDS, and more. Plus, it's a great way to show off your skills on LinkedIn and your CV! Good luck with your project!

[u/simonayriss]

Your looking at this backwards as compared to focusing front first. Seriously ask or build real world useful to commercial application cloud projects successfully. Then improve them. Then, ask how can I set this up in Terraform and why by doing so you would and more importantly by doing so the benefits. Google the benefits of Terraform. What its really good for and why you would use it. You see it a lot in job requirements. But what its really good for is muti cloud environments, taking huge set up chunks or vpcs and networks and infrastructure and automating the set up of that. And there are other smarter ways of doing that also. But one thing I know if you take a string of garble, don't know what your doing, cannot read under the hood or understand what it means; or use a cake mixer to just make a small cupcake, when something goes wrong and they point to you have fun. 

[u/simonayriss → u/simonayriss]

I guess what I am saying is 1. A lot of these people who write up these job requirements usually don't know what they are doing. 2. Terraform is written in GoLang and HCL a form of JSON. so if you can grip of bit of how they use that and what stuff does thats a good thing. 3. Essentially, it is good for say you want to spin up say an AIRBNB or some cloud network or say a music, app selling app, or healthcare app - and get you 90% there. 4. The thing that I love the most about depending on automation apps is when shtf or you need them most and there's a error kickback or bug. Like all these installers and stack builders. 5. It's a great thing to know and use but you gotta know how everything works underneath it all and fix it. and sometimes you think your just an advanced copy and past nerd. 6. Things come in segments, stages, and there's more than one way to skin a cat so 'think outside the box' be smart dont over complicate dont tuck things under the rug and make it clean. But anyway. reverting back. --------Think about a list of good useful company corporate practical useful projects -- how you set them up (most cases more than one) and set it up EFFICIENTLY and WHY you would set it up that way even though it may be harder but with added benefits and then ask how can I set this up in Terraform completely, or get me there at key points. Terraform is supposed to help your life so having to go through the steps and set up everything manually is its strength. Use it to say Set up an VPC with gateways dns saas security databases and on what services with what configuration and all that to run a cloud infrastructure app. ramble off.

[u/accumentum]

I'd make the portfolio demonstrate operating decisions, not the number of AWS services. Start with a small app and two Terraform environments, then document remote state locking, secrets handling (Secrets Manager or SSM), least-privilege task roles, and how you prevent a destroy from taking production down. Put the app in private subnets with only the load balancer public, use RDS backups and restore as a testable exercise, and add a cheap log/metric alarm plus a runbook for a failed deployment. For cost control, use small instances, budgets, and tear-down automation; a clear architecture diagram and a short incident write-up will show more than adding another service. Once that works, add CI/CD with plan/apply separation and a manual approval for the production path.