In Part 1, An introduction to Terraform, you created an AWS Identity and Access Management (IAM) user by clicking around the Console. Now that you have this user, you can create and manage all future IAM users with Terraform. Consider the following Terraform code, which should live in live/global/iam/main.tf:

provider "aws" {

region = "us-east-2"

}

resource "aws_iam_user" "example" {

name = "neo"

}

This code uses the aws_iam_user resource to create a single new IAM user. What if you want to create three IAM users? In a general-purpose programming language, you’d probably use a for-loop:

# This is just pseudo code. It won't actually work in Terraform.

for (i = 0; i < 3; i++) {

resource "aws_iam_user" "example" {

name = "neo"

}

}

Terraform does not have for-loops or other traditional procedural logic built into the language, so this syntax will not work. However, every Terraform resource has a meta-parameter you can use called count. count is Terraform’s oldest, simplest, and most limited iteration construct: all it does is define how many copies of the resource to create. Here’s how you use count to create three IAM users: