Terraform Infrastructure as Code

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool created by HashiCorp in 2014, enabling users to define and provision data center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language. Key features: declarative configuration language HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) for describing infrastructure resources and their relationships in human-readable files. Multi-cloud and multi-platform support with over 3,000 providers for AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, Kubernetes, Docker, VMware, Datadog, GitHub, Fastly, Cloudflare, and virtually any infrastructure platform. Resource lifecycle management including creation, reading, updating, and deletion of infrastructure resources with dependency graph resolution for correct ordering. State management via state files tracking the mapping between configuration and real-world resources, with remote state backends (S3, Azure Blob, GCS, Consul, Terraform Cloud) for team collaboration and locking. Plan and apply workflow: terraform plan shows a preview of changes before execution, terraform apply executes the changes, enabling safe infrastructure changes with review. Module system for reusable, parameterized infrastructure configurations, with the Terraform Registry hosting thousands of community modules. Workspace support for managing multiple environments (dev, staging, production) from the same configuration. Import existing infrastructure into Terraform management. Data sources for reading information from external systems. Provisioners for running scripts and configuration management on resources after creation. Sentinel and OPA policy as code integration for compliance guardrails. Drift detection for identifying configuration changes made outside Terraform. Available as open source and with Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise for team collaboration.