Understanding the basics of Terraform providers

At its heart, Terraform is a platform for reconciling an expressed desired state with an external system. The way Terraform interacts with external APIs is through plugins called providers. A provider is responsible for describing the schema for its exposed resources, and implementing Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) interactions with external APIs. Providers enable Terraform to express nearly any external API's resources as Terraform resources.

Through its thousands of community and verified providers, Terraform is able to manage resources including databases such as Redis, Cassandra, and MongoDB, cloud infrastructure for all major cloud service providers, communication and messaging services such as Discord and SendGrid, and a vast number of other providers. If you are interested, you can explore a listing of them in the Terraform Registry (https://registry.terraform.io/). You can simply write, plan, and apply your way...