Terraform is an

open-source Open source is source code that is made freely available for possible modification and redistribution. Products include permission to use the source code, design documents, or content of the product. The open-source model is a decentralized sof ...

infrastructure-as-code software tool created by

HashiCorp HashiCorp is a software company with a freemium business model based in San Francisco, California. HashiCorp provides open-source tools and commercial products that enable developers, operators and security professionals to provision, secure, run ...

. Users define and provide data center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language known as HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), or optionally

JSON JSON (JavaScript Object Notation, pronounced ; also ) is an open standard file format and data interchange format that uses human-readable text to store and transmit data objects consisting of attribute–value pairs and arrays (or other ser ...

Design

Terraform manages external resources (such as public cloud infrastructure, private cloud infrastructure, network appliances,

software as a service Software as a service (SaaS ) is a software licensing and delivery model in which software is licensed on a subscription basis and is centrally hosted. SaaS is also known as "on-demand software" and Web-based/Web-hosted software. SaaS is con ...

, and

platform as a service Platform as a service (PaaS) or application platform as a service (aPaaS) or platform-based service is a category of cloud computing services that allows customers to provision, instantiate, run, and manage a modular bundle comprising a computin ...

) with "providers". HashiCorp maintains an extensive list of official providers, and can also integrate with community-developed providers. Users can interact with Terraform providers by declaring resources or by calling data sources. Rather than using imperative commands to provision resources, Terraform uses declarative configuration to describe the desired final state. Once a user invokes Terraform on a given resource, Terraform will perform

CRUD In computer programming, create, read, update, and delete (CRUD) are the four basic operations of persistent storage. CRUD is also sometimes used to describe user interface conventions that facilitate viewing, searching, and changing information u ...

actions on the user's behalf to accomplish the desired state. The infrastructure as code can be written as modules, promoting reusability and maintainability. Terraform supports a number of cloud infrastructure providers such as

Amazon Web Services Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS) is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Amazon that provides Software as a service, on-demand cloud computing computing platform, platforms and Application programming interface, APIs to individuals, companies, and gover ...

Cloudflare Cloudflare, Inc. is an American content delivery network and DDoS mitigation company, founded in 2009. It primarily acts as a reverse proxy between a website's visitor and the Cloudflare customer's hosting provider. Its headquarters are in San ...

Microsoft Azure Microsoft Azure, often referred to as Azure ( , ), is a cloud computing platform operated by Microsoft for application management via around the world-distributed data centers. Microsoft Azure has multiple capabilities such as software as a ...

IBM Cloud IBM Cloud, (formerly known as Bluemix) is a set of cloud computing services for business offered by the information technology company IBM. Services As of 2021, IBM Cloud contains more than 170 services including compute, storage, networki ...

, Serverspace,

Google Cloud Platform Google Cloud Platform (GCP), offered by Google, is a suite of cloud computing services that runs on the same infrastructure that Google uses internally for its end-user products, such as Google Search, Gmail, Google Drive, and YouTube. Alongside ...

DigitalOcean DigitalOcean Holdings, Inc. () is an American multinational technology company and cloud service provider. The company is headquartered in New York City, New York, USA, with 15 globally distributed data centers worldwide. DigitalOcean provides ...

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure Oracle Cloud is a cloud computing service offered by Oracle Corporation providing servers, storage, network, applications and services through a global network of Oracle Corporation managed data centers. The company allows the ...

Yandex.Cloud Yandex Cloud is a public cloud platform developed by the Russian internet company Yandex. Yandex Cloud provides private and corporate users with infrastructure and computing resources in an ‘as a service’ format. History Yandex's plans to ...

VMware vSphere VMware vSphere (formerly VMware Infrastructure 4) is VMware's cloud computing virtualization platform. It includes an updated vCenter Configuration Manager, as well as vCenter Application Discovery Manager, and the ability of vMotion to move m ...

, and

OpenStack OpenStack is a free, open standard cloud computing platform. It is mostly deployed as infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) in both public and private clouds where virtual servers and other resources are made available to users. The software plat ...

. HashiCorp maintains a Terraform Module Registry, launched in 2017. In 2019, Terraform introduced the paid version called Terraform Enterprise for larger organizations.

References

External links

* * {{github, hashicorp/terraform Cross-platform software Cloud infrastructure Free software for cloud computing Systems engineering Orchestration software Free software programmed in Go Software using the Mozilla license

Design

See also

References

External links