How to set up a new AWS project in under 12 minutes

Source: Dev.to

Every DevOps engineer knows the pain: a new project kicks off and you’re buried in AWS console tabs, IAM policies, and Terraform boilerplate.
Running through the 10 standard setup steps — account, IAM, VPC, Terraform state, modules, CloudWatch, OIDC, Secrets Manager, test deploy — takes 400+ minutes. Every single time.

The real issue: it’s identical every time, yet always done manually.

Trust Policy (CI assumes a role, never stores a key)

{
  "Version": "2012-10-17",
  "Statement": [
    {
      "Effect": "Allow",
      "Principal": {
        "Federated": "arn:aws:iam::ACCOUNT_ID:oidc-provider/token.actions.githubusercontent.com"
      },
      "Action": "sts:AssumeRoleWithWebIdentity",
      "Condition": {
        "StringEquals": {
          "token.actions.githubusercontent.com:sub": "repo:YOUR_ORG/YOUR_REPO:ref:refs/heads/main"
        }
      }
    }
  ]
}

• No stored credentials.
• Per‑repo permissions.
• Auto‑expiring tokens.

Provisioning Tips

• Parallel provisioning: VPC and IAM have no dependency — provision them simultaneously.
• Reusable trust policies: Template OIDC relationships once, then stamp per project.
• State backend first: Set up remote state + locking before anything else.
• If you’re managing 3+ projects or 2+ AWS accounts, manual overhead compounds fast.

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