Terraform - do you have any sandbox?

Question

While I'm trying to train new people on Terraform, I always find it quite cumbersome to have to deal with real infrastructure.

First, because it involves finding a non-sensitive cloud account or creating a new one, creating an identity for the new user (including setting-up some security stuff like two FA, ...), which could take some times (especially if you are in a traditional corporate environment where finding a CB to make payments is almost impossible).

Second, because as you are creating real infrastructure, you rapidly come into quirks that are impeding the learning curve, like the time it takes to create various types of infrastructure, the cost associated with some stuff, the need to deprovision them afterward since they are just tests, ...

Are you aware of any sandbox environment where it would be very easy to create infrastructure with Terraform (even not a real one), in order to concentrate on Terraform and stop wasting time on "side-stuff"? Do you share the same struggle?

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

Terraform does support LocalStack which is:

LocalStack provides an easy-to-use test/mocking framework for developing Cloud applications. It spins up a testing environment on your local machine that provides the same functionality and APIs as the real AWS cloud environment.

So you could set it up and test it how it would suit your teaching requirements.

If you are in academia and are working with AWS, AWS offers AWS Educate for students for free. Thus, you could also use that for sandbox if possible.