Summary

With the help of this chapter, you will now have a fair understanding of what Terraform is. Terraform is an IaC orchestration tool introduced by HashiCorp that is mainly used for the provisioning of infrastructure for your applications in code format. It is written in HCL, which is easily readable and understood, and we have also examined a number of different use cases, including multi-tier applications, SDNs, multi-cloud deployment, and resource schedulers, as well as examples of where you can use Terraform.

Moving on, you got to understand how Terraform differs from other IaCs, such as with ARM templates and CloudFormation, in terms of language, readability, modularity, error handling, and suchlike. Later, we explained Terraform architecture, and from there we got to know about how Terraform Core is used to communicate with Terraform plugins using RPCs, and by using Terraform Core, we would be able to run different Terraform CLI commands, including init, plan, and apply.

In the next chapter, we are going to discuss how you can install terraform.exe on a different machine, such as Windows, macOS, and Linux, which will help you in getting started with Terraform.