# Basic Two-Tier AWS Architecture This provides a template for running a simple two-tier architecture on Amazon Web services. The premise is that you have stateless app servers running behind an ELB serving traffic. To simplify the example, this intentionally ignores deploying and getting your application onto the servers. However, you could do so either via [provisioners](https://www.terraform.io/docs/provisioners/) and a configuration management tool, or by pre-baking configured AMIs with [Packer](http://www.packer.io). After you run `terraform apply` on this configuration, it will automatically output the DNS address of the ELB. After your instance registers, this should respond with the default nginx web page. To run, configure your AWS provider as described in https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/aws/index.html Run with a command like this: ``` terraform apply -var 'key_name={your_aws_key_name}' \ -var 'key_path={location_of_your_key_in_your_local_machine}'` ``` For example: ``` terraform apply -var 'key_name=terraform' -var 'key_path=/Users/jsmith/.ssh/terraform.pem' ```