What Is Terraform? 🤔 Infrastructure as Code

What Is Terraform?

Terraform is an IAC tool, used primarily by DevOps teams to automate various infrastructure tasks. The provisioning of cloud resources, for instance, is one of the main use cases of Terraform. It’s a cloud-agnostic, open-source provisioning tool written in the Go language and created by HashiCorp.

Terraform allows you to describe your complete infrastructure in the form of code. Even if your servers come from different providers such as AWS or Azure, Terraform helps you build and manage these resources in parallel across providers. Think of Terraform as connective tissue and common language that you can utilize to manage your entire IT stack.

What is Terraform used for?

One of the main functions of Terraform is for public cloud provisioning on one of the major providers. Providing an IaC for services such as AWS and Azure has -- and will continue to be -- the main focus of Terraform. Terraform enables the use of these public clouds via a provider, a plugin that wraps existing APIs and languages like Azure Bicep, and creates Terraform syntax.

The second main use for Terraform is to facilitate multi-cloud deployments. One of the main draws of Terraform is that it performs across all cloud providers simultaneously, unlike some of its other IaC competitors. The capability to deploy resources into multiple cloud providers is critical because engineers can utilize the same syntax without familiarizing themselves with multiple tools and technologies.

Learn Terraform from this devops shorts