Understanding the basics of Terraform

Terraform (https://www.terraform.io/) is an open source IaC tool written in Go and created by HashiCorp that provides a consistent command-line experience for managing a wide variety of resources. With Terraform, infrastructure engineers define the desired state of a set of hierarchical resources using declarative Terraform configuration files or with imperative code (https://www.terraform.io/cdktf), which results in Terraform configurations files. These configuration files are the code in IaC. They can be used to manage the full life cycle of creating, mutating, and destroying resources, plan and predict changes to resources, provide a graph of dependencies in complex resource topologies, and store the last observed state of a system.

Terraform is simple to get started and has a fairly linear learning curve. There are many features of Terraform we will not cover in this chapter that will be useful as you deepen your adoption of the tool. The...