Terraform

Terraform enables teams to safely and predictably create, change, and improve infrastructure. It is an open source tool that codifies APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned.

The key features include Infrastructure as Code, where infrastructure is described using a high-level configuration syntax that can be versioned and shared. Execution Plans allow generating a plan of changes before applying them, avoiding surprises. The Resource Graph builds a dependency graph for efficient parallelized creation and modification of resources.

Change Automation applies complex changesets with minimal human interaction, using execution plans and resource graphs to precisely control what changes and in what order, reducing human errors.

Terraform uses declarative configuration files to codify infrastructure APIs. It performs a planning step to generate an execution plan showing intended changes. It builds a resource graph to parallelize non-dependent operations and applies changes in dependency order. Commands like init prepare the directory, validate checks syntax, plan shows changes, apply executes them, and destroy removes infrastructure.