Summary

This chapter provided an overview of Terraform and its architecture and workflow, as well as a comparison between Terraform and CloudFormation. Terraform is a popular IaC tool that allows for safe and efficient management of infrastructure across multiple cloud providers. It relies on plugins called providers to interact with cloud providers, SaaS providers, and other APIs. Terraform uses modules to organize and encapsulate configurations into logical components, making it easier to navigate and understand complex configurations. Using modules can also provide consistency in your configurations and make them easier for other teams to use. Terraform uses resource blocks to manage infrastructure objects in your configuration, with most providers having several different resources that map to the appropriate APIs to manage that infrastructure type. The workflow of Terraform consists of five key steps: Write, Init, Plan, Apply, and Destroy.

The chapter also compared Terraform...