Introducing Terraform providers

In this section, we will learn what Terraform providers are. Going further, we will try to understand Terraform providers for the major clouds, such as GCP, AWS, and Azure. Once you have an understanding of Terraform providers, we will see how you can define a Terraform providers block in your configuration code and how your Terraform configuration code downloads specific providers when you execute terraform init.

Terraform providers

You may be wondering how Terraform knows where to go and create resources in, let's say, for example, a situation where you want to deploy a virtual network resource in Azure. How will Terraform understand that it needs to go and create the resources in Azure and not in other clouds? Terraform manages to identify the Terraform provider. So, let's try to understand what the definition of a Terraform provider is:

Figure 3.1 – Terraform providers

A provider is an executable...