DevOps Dictionary

Terraform is an infrastructure as code (IaC) tool from HashiCorp that lets teams define cloud and on-prem infrastructure in declarative configuration files, then automatically create and update those resources in a controlled way. It solves the problem of manual, inconsistent provisioning by describing the desired end state and using providers (plugins that talk to platform APIs) to plan changes and apply them predictably, with state tracking what exists so updates are incremental rather than rebuilds.

With Terraform, environments can be versioned, reviewed, and recreated consistently across accounts and providers; without it, teams often rely on click-ops and ad hoc scripts that drift over time, making deployments slower, harder to audit, and riskier to roll back. This gap exists because Terraform standardizes the workflow around planning, change diffs, and repeatable execution.