Terraform is a tool that helps you manage various cloud infrastructure services in the form of code. You codify your infrastructure, and so it’s also known as Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

The cloud has become important to more and more companies. It not only helps reduce time and costs but also lets customers focus on their core business.

Why Infrastructure as Code?

As the number of cloud providers increases and their services become more flexible, it’s becoming more important to be able to manage your cloud infrastructure resources.

Terraform works on the concept of Infrastructure as Code (IaC). In simple terms, IaC is the ability to represent your infrastructure in the form code.

Let’s take as an example any computing resource on a given cloud, like EC2 on AWS. Requesting an EC2 instance from AWS is a matter of signing up with AWS, providing a bunch of values, and clicking on the “Launch” button. The “resource” will be ready in a few minutes.

As long as we can provide those values to AWS, they’ll live on that cloud provider. Of course, this is the traditional way to do this.

Terraform provides a way to take these credentials and inputs in the form of _configurations _and process them to create a resource in the target cloud.

These configurations describe the resource in a language that Terraform understands. Configurations are how you can declare the desired state of your infrastructure – basically, “Declarative” syntax.

Terraform uses cloud provider APIs to create the resource.

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