Terraform is a command-line tool that, in its basic version, is open source, uses the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), is declarative, and is relatively easy to read. Its main advantage is the use of the same language to deploy on a multitude of cloud providers such as Azure, AWS, and Google—the complete list is available here: https://www.terraform.io/docs/providers/.
Terraform has other advantages:
- It's multiplatform, and it can be installed on Windows, Linux, and Mac.
- It allows a preview of infrastructure changes before they are implemented.
- It allows the parallelization of operations by taking into account resource dependencies.
- It integrates a very large number of providers.
Terraform can be installed in your system in a number of ways. Let's begin by looking at the manual installation method.