Terraform is the de-facto Infrastructure as Code standard for provisioning cloud resources at companies like Razorpay, Zerodha, and PhonePe — turning a declarative HCL file into real, versioned, repeatable infrastructure instead of manual console clicks. This pillar covers the core building blocks every engineer needs before touching a production .tf file.
What This Pillar Covers
- Providers and resource blocks — configuring providers, resource dependency graphs, and implicit vs explicit dependencies
- Variables, locals, and outputs — input variables, sensitive data handling, and passing values between modules
- The plan-apply-destroy lifecycle — how Terraform diffs desired state against real infrastructure
- State management — remote backends (S3 + DynamoDB locking), state isolation with workspaces
- Reusable modules — the Terraform Registry, module versioning, and composition patterns
- Drift detection — spotting and reconciling manual changes made outside Terraform
Who This Is For
DevOps engineers, platform engineers, and cloud engineers provisioning and maintaining cloud infrastructure who need a solid grip on Terraform's state model and workflow before writing production-grade modules.