Terraform in Action

2 Life cycle of a Terraform resource

This chapter covers

• Generating and applying execution plans
• Analyzing when Terraform triggers function hooks
• Using the Local provider to create and manage files
• Simulating, detecting, and correcting for configuration drift
• Understanding the basics of Terraform state management

When you do away with all the bells and whistles, Terraform is a surprisingly simple technology. Fundamentally, Terraform is a state management tool that performs CRUD operations (create, read, update, delete) on managed resources. Often, managed resources are cloud-based resources, but they don’t have to be. Anything that can be represented as CRUD can be managed as a Terraform resource.

In this chapter, we deep-dive into the internals ...