Understanding Terraform state
Terraform uses the state to remember what was previously provisioned in a given workspace. Some critics of Terraform, when they compare it to AWS CloudFormation or ARM templates, point out that these technologies don’t rely on this concept of maintaining state in an externalized file. Of course, this is only true because these tools only support a single target platform and can tightly couple to the proprietary nature in which those platforms maintain state. However, Terraform—with its flexible plugin architecture—can’t assume anything about the platform and the resources that it provisions to each target platform. Therefore, Terraform needs to drop to the lowest common denominator and ensure that it knows what it has provisioned before in a uniform and consistent fashion.
This approach to maintaining the state provides a couple of benefits. First, it uniformly records what Terraform has provisioned across platforms that...
