Terraform is HashiCorp's infrastructure as code tool. It lets you define resources and infrastructure in human-readable, declarative configuration files and manages your infrastructure's lifecycle. Using Terraform has several advantages over manually managing infrastructure:
Manage any infrastructure: Terraform plugins — called providers — let Terraform interact with cloud platforms and other services via their APIs.
Standardize your deployment workflow: You can compose resources from different providers into reusable Terraform configurations called modules and manage them with a consistent language and workflow.
Track your infrastructure: Terraform tracks your infrastructure in a state file, acting as a single source of truth for your environment. Terraform uses the state file to determine the changes to make to your infrastructure so that it will match your configuration.
Collaborate: When you use HCP Terraform, you can securely share your state with your teammates, provide a stable environment for Terraform to run in, and prevent race conditions when multiple people make configuration changes at once.
Hear from senior software engineer Vaibhav Tandon on how LinkedIn uses Terraform as a service to enable infrastructure as code uniformly across its teams.