Summary

In this chapter, we discussed how Terraform uses the state to keep track of the current resources and to decide which actions it needs to perform to bring the current state to the desired state. A thorough understanding of the state is critical to mastering Terraform and anticipating what Terraform will do. We also introduced the concept of the backend where you store the Terraform state in Google Cloud Storage so that teams can collaborate without stepping on each other’s toes. We recommend that you use backend states even if you work by yourself. Storing the Terraform state in Google Cloud Storage guarantees that it will never get lost, and if you enable versioning in your bucket, you can retrieve older versions if necessary.

We then introduced meta-arguments, which are special Terraform constructs to influence the behavior of Terraform and help to write Terraform code more efficiently.

In the next chapter, we continue our exploration of Terraform by introducing...