Provisioning and configuration management
In Chapter 5, Connecting with Other Tools, you learned how to connect Terraform with various existing infrastructure tools. We've spent a lot of time on configuration management systems in particular. It is a popular thing to say these days that configuration management tools are not required any longer and immutable infrastructure, containers, or whatever is the best and only practice. Some people on the Internet even argue that you can replace Chef and Puppet only with Terraform. Certainly, that's not the case. Even though you could indeed replace Terraform with Chef or Puppet.
Terraform covers only one level of infrastructure (as discussed in Chapter 1,Infrastructure Automation), and it does it reasonably well. For everything that goes inside a particular piece of hardware (or virtual hardware), you need a proper configuration management tool, regardless of whether you need to configure an EC2 instance, a big bare metal server, or networking hardware...
