Terraform

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that allows you to define, provision, and manage infrastructure in a declarative configuration file. Terraform can manage infrastructure across public, private, and hybrid clouds as well as on-premises datacenters.

The key benefit of Terraform is that it allows you to define your infrastructure resources in a high-level configuration language called HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language). You describe the desired end-state of your infrastructure in Terraform configuration files (.tf files) and Terraform generates a plan to reach that end-state. For example, you can define AWS resources like EC2 instances, RDS databases, VPCs, etc in .tf files. Terraform will then provision and configure those resources based on your specifications. Some key commands are terraform init to initialize a Terraform working directory, terraform plan to preview changes, and terraform apply to provision/update the infrastructure. Overall, Terraform enables consistent, predictable infra provisioning and management as code across environments.