Terraform

Terraform is HashiCorp's infrastructure as code tool, owned by IBM, that provisions AWS, Azure and Google Cloud resources from HCL files for platform teams.

Terraform describes infrastructure in configuration files written in HCL, its own configuration language, and then creates, changes or destroys real resources until they match. Every run starts with an execution plan that lists each create, update and destroy, so a person can review the change before anything is touched. HashiCorp built Terraform, and IBM has owned HashiCorp since the acquisition closed on 27 February 2025. Vault, Consul, Nomad and Packer come from the same company and are sold as separate products. The Terraform CLI, known as Community Edition, runs plan and apply against providers from the Terraform Registry, where HashiCorp maintains the official providers for AWS, Azure and Google Cloud. State can live in a remote backend that locks it during every write, and import blocks bring resources created by hand under management. HCP Terraform, the hosted service, adds remote runs, projects and workspaces, a VCS connection and a private registry for shared modules. Its policy enforcement runs Sentinel or Open Policy Agent checks during runs, and cost estimation adds the expected monthly cost to each run. Health assessments detect drift between live resources and the configuration, and Stacks pass outputs from one deployment to another. Terraform suits platform and DevOps teams that run infrastructure across more than one cloud and want every change reviewed like application code. Platform teams use the private registry and no-code provisioning to hand approved modules to application developers. Organizations with compliance rules rely on policy checks, per-workspace Read, Plan and Write roles, and runs that wait for confirmation before apply. Terraform comes in three editions: the downloadable Community Edition, the hosted HCP Terraform, and Terraform Enterprise for companies that run it on their own infrastructure. A typical change starts as a pull request in GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket or Azure DevOps. HCP Terraform posts a speculative plan to the request, and a reviewer reads it before the change is merged. Self-hosted agents run those plans inside private networks, using only outbound connections to the hosted service. Teams also schedule auto-destroy on development workspaces and import existing cloud estates so one codebase manages them. Terraform fits engineering groups that want provisioning across AWS, Azure and Google Cloud to run from a reviewed, versioned codebase.