A Beginner's Plain-Language Guide to How Terraform Manages Cloud Infrastructure

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Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool developed by HashiCorp that lets users define and build cloud infrastructure through code rather than manual console interactions. It uses HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) in a file called main.tf, and communicates with cloud providers such as AWS and Azure via provider plugins and API calls. Before Terraform, migrating infrastructure across cloud platforms was costly and time-consuming due to each provider having its own unique tooling and syntax. Terraform addresses this by offering a single, unified tool that works across multiple cloud providers through a provider plugin system. It tracks all created resources and their metadata in a state file called terraform.tfstate, enabling it to manage future updates and changes reliably.

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