What Is Terraform Used For?

Terraform is an open-source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool developed by HashiCorp. It is used to automate the deployment, provisioning, and management of infrastructure resources across various cloud providers and on-premises environments. Terraform allows you to define your infrastructure in a declarative configuration language known as HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) or alternatively in JSON format.

Here are some key use cases and features of Terraform

1. Infrastructure Provisioning: Terraform helps you provision and manage infrastructure resources such as virtual machines, networks, storage, load balancers, and more. It supports popular cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) as well as on-premises infrastructure and various other services.
2. Infrastructure as Code: With Terraform, you define your infrastructure configuration in code, making it versionable, maintainable, and shareable. This enables you to treat infrastructure as code, allowing you to apply software engineering practices such as version control, code review, and collaboration.
3. Declarative Configuration: Terraform uses a declarative approach, where you define the desired state of your infrastructure. It automatically figures out the actions required to reach that state, and then provisions or updates resources accordingly. This allows for idempotent and predictable infrastructure management.
4. Plan and Apply: Terraform provides a powerful planning mechanism that allows you to preview the changes it will make to your infrastructure before applying them. This helps you understand the impact of your configuration changes and reduces the risk of unintended consequences. You can then apply the changes to provision or update your infrastructure.
5. Infrastructure Orchestration: Terraform allows you to define complex dependencies and relationships between resources. This allows you to create infrastructure components spanning multiple services or cloud providers and coordinate their provisioning and configuration.
6. Infrastructure State Management: Terraform maintains a state file that keeps track of the resources it manages. This state file is used to progressively plan and implement changes. And it also serves as a source of truth for your infrastructure. It can be stored locally or remotely, allowing team members to collaborate and share state.

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