Author(s): Tarun Agarwal

Originally published on Towards AI.

The plain-English guide I wish I’d had before my first terraform apply

Here’s how most cloud setups start.

The article explains what Terraform is and why it became the default infrastructure-as-code tool, focusing on how it lets you write infrastructure “blueprints” as code, then uses a predictable workflow (write, plan, apply, state) to create and track resources. It highlights the main benefits—one tool with many providers, seeing changes before applying them, enabling code review, and making environments repeatable—then outlines the real drawbacks, especially around Terraform state management, HCL not being a full programming language for complex logic, drift when changes are made outside Terraform, slow plans in large projects, and licensing concerns after the shift to BSL and later IBM’s acquisition. Finally, it surveys alternatives (OpenTofu, Pulumi, AWS-native tools like CloudFormation/AWS CDK, Azure Bicep, and Crossplane for Kubernetes-native management) and concludes with guidance on choosing based on constraints (ecosystem, open-source requirements, preference for real programming languages, cloud specificity, and Kubernetes integration), emphasizing that the “best” tool is less important than good infrastructure habits like remote state with locking/encryption, planning in CI, keeping configs small, and avoiding console clicks that create drift.

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Published via Towards AI