Terraform (software)

Terraform is an infrastructure-as-code software tool created by HashiCorp. Users define and provide data center infrastructure using a declarative configuration language known as HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), or optionally JSON.^[3]

Terraform

Original author(s)	Mitchell Hashimoto et al.
Developer(s)	HashiCorp
Initial release	28 July 2014; 10 years ago (2014-07-28)
Stable release	v1.10.3 / 18 December 2024; 4 months ago (2024-12-18)[1]
Repository	github.com/hashicorp/terraform
Written in	Go
Operating system	Linux, FreeBSD, macOS, OpenBSD, Solaris, and Microsoft Windows
Available in	English
Type	Infrastructure as code
License	Business Source License v1.1[2](source-available)
Website	www.terraform.io

Characteristics

Terraform manages external resources (such as public cloud infrastructure, private cloud infrastructure, network appliances, software as a service, and platform as a service) with "providers". HashiCorp maintains an extensive list of official providers, and can also integrate with community-developed providers.^[4] Users can interact with Terraform providers by declaring resources^[5] or by calling data sources.^[6] Rather than using imperative commands to provision resources, Terraform uses declarative configuration to describe the desired final state. Once a user invokes Terraform on a given resource, Terraform will perform CRUD actions on the user's behalf to accomplish the desired state.^[7] The infrastructure as code can be written as modules, promoting reusability and maintainability.^[8]

Terraform supports a number of cloud infrastructure providers such as Amazon Web Services, Cloudflare,^[9] Microsoft Azure, IBM Cloud, Serverspace, Selectel^[10] Google Cloud Platform,^[11] DigitalOcean,^[12] Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, Yandex.Cloud,^[13] VMware vSphere, and OpenStack.^{[14][15][16][17][18]}

History

HashiCorp launched the Terraform Module Registry in 2017.^[19] In 2019, the paid version Terraform Enterprise was introduced.^[20]

Terraform was previously free software available under version 2.0 of the Mozilla Public License (MPL). On August 10, 2023, HashiCorp announced that all products produced by the company would be relicensed under the Business Source License (BUSL), with HashiCorp prohibiting commercial use of the community edition by those who offer "competitive services".^[21]

OpenTofu was created as a fork resulting from the HashiCorp changing the Terraform license to a BSL.^[22]