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For a while now we've had information equivalent to this in various internal documents that we've referred to when designing features such as config-driven refactoring, the "replace" planning option, and so forth. However, so far we've not put that information in any sort of durable public place that we can easily find and refer to when having design discussions on GitHub and similar. This is therefore an attempt to capture a summary of the three main design patterns we've identified for planning-related behaviors, with a few motivating examples of each one, in the hope that this will be a good reference and some helpful inspiration for future design work. It's intentionally not totally comprehensive of all planning behaviors both because that would duplicate the end-user-oriented documentation and because it would be burdensome to keep updating this document each time we add anything new which might fit into these categories. However, we might add a later feature to this document if it illustrates a new take or different perspective on one of these patterns.
Terraform
- Website: https://www.terraform.io
- Forums: HashiCorp Discuss
- Documentation: https://www.terraform.io/docs/
- Tutorials: HashiCorp's Learn Platform
- Certification Exam: HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate
Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. Terraform can manage existing and popular service providers as well as custom in-house solutions.
The key features of Terraform are:
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Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure is described using a high-level configuration syntax. This allows a blueprint of your datacenter to be versioned and treated as you would any other code. Additionally, infrastructure can be shared and re-used.
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Execution Plans: Terraform has a "planning" step where it generates an execution plan. The execution plan shows what Terraform will do when you call apply. This lets you avoid any surprises when Terraform manipulates infrastructure.
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Resource Graph: Terraform builds a graph of all your resources, and parallelizes the creation and modification of any non-dependent resources. Because of this, Terraform builds infrastructure as efficiently as possible, and operators get insight into dependencies in their infrastructure.
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Change Automation: Complex changesets can be applied to your infrastructure with minimal human interaction. With the previously mentioned execution plan and resource graph, you know exactly what Terraform will change and in what order, avoiding many possible human errors.
For more information, see the introduction section of the Terraform website.
Getting Started & Documentation
Documentation is available on the Terraform website:
If you're new to Terraform and want to get started creating infrastructure, please check out our Getting Started guides on HashiCorp's learning platform. There are also additional guides to continue your learning.
Show off your Terraform knowledge by passing a certification exam. Visit the certification page for information about exams and find study materials on HashiCorp's learning platform.
Developing Terraform
This repository contains only Terraform core, which includes the command line interface and the main graph engine. Providers are implemented as plugins, and Terraform can automatically download providers that are published on the Terraform Registry. HashiCorp develops some providers, and others are developed by other organizations. For more information, see Extending Terraform.
To learn more about compiling Terraform and contributing suggested changes, please refer to the contributing guide.
To learn more about how we handle bug reports, please read the bug triage guide.