Terraform is an open source tool that you can use to preview, configure, and manage cloud infrastructure and resources in a secure and efficient manner.
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Overview
Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that is designed to help developers and O&M teams automate the creation, management, and deployment of infrastructure. Terraform allows you to write simple code to define and configure cloud infrastructure without manual operations or configurations. The following figure shows how Terraform works.
Resources and providers are core concepts of Terraform. Resources of infrastructure include computing, storage, and network resources. Providers are plug-ins developed by cloud service providers. Alibaba Cloud is the first cloud service provider in China to integrate with Terraform and is one of the active providers in the community. Alibaba Cloud users can use Terraform to manage Alibaba Cloud resources.
Benefits
IaC: Terraform allows you to store definitions and configurations of infrastructure as code. This facilitates code version control, team collaboration, and code reuse, and improves efficiency while reducing manual operations and errors.
High reliability and stability: The Alibaba Cloud technical team provides internal assurance capabilities such as testing of scenario-based automated use cases and automatic platform integration to ensure stability and reliability.
Rich resource support: Alibaba Cloud provides services based on the resource-based concept and standardizes the definitions of Terraform resources. This provides users with out-of-the-box experience.
Declarative language: Terraform uses HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) as the configuration language. HCL is a declarative language that describes the desired state instead of detailed steps, which makes the code easier to understand and maintain.
High scalability: Terraform provides a wide range of resources and providers to meet different requirements. Terraform allows you to customize and extend plug-ins to support specific infrastructure.
Integration with other tools: Terraform can be integrated with other tools, such as Ansible, Jenkins, and GitLab. This implements more complex automated workflows, such as automated testing, continuous integration, and continuous deployment.