Terraform (software)

 Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool created by HashiCorp. Users define and provide data center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language known as HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), or optionally JSON.^[3]

Terraform manages external resources (such as public cloud infrastructure, private cloud infrastructure, network appliances, software as a service, and platform as a service) with "providers". HashiCorp maintains an extensive list of official providers, and can also integrate with community-developed providers.^[4] Users can interact with Terraform providers by declaring resources^[5] or by calling data sources.^[6] Rather than using imperative commands to provision resources, Terraform uses declarative configuration to describe the desired final state. Once a user invokes Terraform on a given resource, Terraform will perform CRUD actions on the user's behalf to accomplish the desired state.^[7] The infrastructure as code can be written as modules, promoting reusability and maintainability.^[8]

Terraform supports a number of cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Serverspace, Google Cloud Platform,^[9] DigitalOcean,^[10] Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Yandex.Cloud,^[11] VMware vSphere, and OpenStack.^{[12][13][14][15][16]}

HashiCorp also supports a Terraform Module Registry, launched in 2017.^[17] In 2019, Terraform introduced the paid version called Terraform Enterprise for larger organizations.^[18]

Terraform has four major commands:

$ terraform init
$ terraform plan
$ terraform apply
$ terraform destroy