Adaptation and integration
As we’ve discussed, Terraform and its providers are open source projects, so there may be limits to what it can do or what is available. As a result, we often need to find ways of overcoming these limitations—even temporarily. In this section, we’ll look at several providers that help Terraform reach outside and take advantage of external programs and systems that can enhance Terraform and help it overcome situations lacking a built-in solution.
Accessing external resources
Like many utility providers, the external provider is tiny. It only has one data source of the same name as the provider: external. As the name implies, this data source allows you to integrate with third-party components. It enables you to execute a local program, pass its input, and process the output. This capability can be advantageous when you want to obtain dynamic configuration from an external source, perform complex transformations on inputs you receive...
