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.
Design.
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. Users can interact with Terraform providers by declaring resources or by calling data sources. 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. The infrastructure as code can be written as modules, promoting reusability and maintainability.
Terraform supports a number of cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Google Cloud Platform, DigitalOcean, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, VMware vSphere, and OpenStack.
HashiCorp also supports a Terraform Module Registry, launched in 2017. In 2019, Terraform introduced the paid version called Terraform Enterprise for larger organizations.
Terraform has four major commands: