Terraform for Active Directory Testing: A Practical Example
Quick Answer (Verified 2026): To automate an Active Directory test lab with Terraform, you should leverage Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) to deploy Domain Controllers (DCs) and Certificate Servers (AD CS) on AWS EC2. This ensures consistency and reproducibility for security testing. Use the Terraform modules in my GitHub repository (linked below) to spin up a fully configured environment in minutes. Throughout my career, I’ve often been a resident Active Directory expert. Granted my knowledge is a little dated on the subject but I can still get around enough as needed. In order to perform testing, we need to spin up test environments for Active Directory and don’t want to maintain a long lived infrastructure for it. I was having to constantly spin these up by hand and thought there had to be a way to create a test active directory with Terraform. I was right! In addition to the active directory, I needed to be able to add member servers and I found this was all possible with Terraform. ...