Writing infrastructure as code is quite often an exercise in:
a) define what I want
b) write an API call to find out whether what I want already exists
c) write an API call to create it if it doesn't exist
d) Sometimes people do stuff manually and your code should tolerate working around these manual changes (i.e. update in place when possible, tear down and recreate when not possible)
e) To be efficient, your code should run things in parallel when possible
Terraform allows you to write (a) and outsource the rest to a provider (b,c) usually maintained by the API provider themselves or Terraform itself (d,e)
a) define what I want b) write an API call to find out whether what I want already exists c) write an API call to create it if it doesn't exist d) Sometimes people do stuff manually and your code should tolerate working around these manual changes (i.e. update in place when possible, tear down and recreate when not possible) e) To be efficient, your code should run things in parallel when possible
Terraform allows you to write (a) and outsource the rest to a provider (b,c) usually maintained by the API provider themselves or Terraform itself (d,e)