DevOps
What is Terraform?
A declarative infrastructure-as-code tool that provisions cloud resources across providers using HCL configuration and a plan/apply workflow.
Definition
Terraform, by HashiCorp, lets teams declare infrastructure — VPCs, databases, DNS records, Kubernetes clusters — in HCL files and provision it across AWS, GCP, Azure, and hundreds of other providers through a plugin ecosystem. The workflow is deliberate: terraform plan shows a diff of what will change, terraform apply executes it, and a state file records the mapping between config and real resources. Remote state with locking (S3 plus DynamoDB, or Terraform Cloud) enables team collaboration. After the 2023 license change, the open-source fork OpenTofu emerged as a drop-in alternative.