What Is Terraform? | IBM 15IGO"/> 15IGO - Automation Platform"/> By Derek Robertson, Matthew Kosinski and Gregg Lindemulder Terraform defined Terraform is an enterprise-grade infrastructure as code (IaC) product created by HashiCorp. Terraform provides a unified infrastructure lifecycle management interface and a single workflow for provisioning infrastructure components for multiple clouds (AWS, Azure and Google Cloud), networks, private data centers and SaaS environments.  With Terraform, users can create, update and destroy infrastructure components by writing human-readable configuration files. These configuration files use a declarative language rather than a procedural language. Users describe the desired end state for infrastructure resources, and Terraform handles the rest. It automatically creates an execution plan, identifies dependencies between resources and provisions components in the correct order. For example, if a virtual machine (VM) depends on a virtual private cloud (VPC), Terraform ensures that the VPC is created before provisioning the VM. In contrast, with a procedural language, developers must write step-by-step instructions to provision infrastructure. Terraform configuration files can be versioned, reused and shared. Terraform manages low-level components, such as compute and storage resources and S3 buckets, and high-level components, such as Domain Name System (DNS) entries and software as a service (SaaS) features. In February 2025, IBM acquired HashiCorp and its offerings, including Terraform.  The latest tech news, backed by expert insights Stay up to date on the most important—and intriguing—industry trends on AI, automation, data and beyond with the Think newsletter. See the IBM Privacy Statement.