Error waiting for instance (i-…) to become ready: unexpected state ‘terminated’, wanted target ‘running’

When you launch a server instance with Terraform, sometimes the error message does not contain the underlying cause. When the cloud provider cannot complete the request, many times Terraform displays a generic error message:

Error waiting for instance (i-...) to become ready: unexpected state 'terminated', wanted target 'running'


To find the root cause of the error in AWS

1. Log into the AWS console and navigate to the EC2 section,
2. Search for the instance by the instance Id,
3. You can find the error message at the bottom of the Description tab
   

In our specific case, it was Client.VolumeLimitExceeded: Volume limit exceeded

We had to increase the volume limit to be able to launch more large EC2 instances.