Terraform Explained for Beginners

What is Terraform?

Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code tool used to create and manage cloud resources using configuration files. Instead of manually creating servers and networks through cloud consoles, you write Terraform code that automatically provisions everything you need.

What can Terraform manage?

Terraform can manage:

• EC2, S3, VPC - Core AWS infrastructure
• Kubernetes clusters - EKS, AKS, GKE deployments
• Load balancers - Application and network load balancers
• IAM roles - Security and access management

Terraform works with 3000+ providers, making it the most versatile IaC tool available.

Is Terraform better than CloudFormation?

Terraform is cloud-agnostic, while CloudFormation is AWS-only. This makes Terraform preferred in multi-cloud environments where companies use AWS, Azure, and GCP together.

Terraform also has a larger community, more providers, and better documentation, making it the industry standard for infrastructure automation.