Terraform

Terraform, by HashiCorp, is the de facto standard for infrastructure as code (IaC). Instead of clicking through cloud consoles, teams describe their infrastructure — servers, networks, databases, DNS, Kubernetes, SaaS resources, and more — in declarative HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). Terraform builds a dependency graph, shows a plan of exactly what will change, and then provisions or updates resources to match the desired state, making infrastructure repeatable, reviewable, and version-controlled.

Its defining strength is being cloud-agnostic and broadly extensible. Thousands of providers let one workflow manage AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, and hundreds of other platforms, while state management tracks real-world resources and modules package reusable infrastructure. HCP Terraform (the managed cloud service, formerly Terraform Cloud) and Terraform Enterprise add remote state, collaboration, policy as code (Sentinel/OPA), run management, and a private module registry for teams that need governance and scale beyond the open-source CLI.

Terraform serves DevOps, platform, and SRE teams automating infrastructure across clouds. The open-source CLI is free; HCP Terraform is pay-as-you-go by managed resource — a free tier up to 500 resources, then Essentials around $0.10, Standard around $0.47, and Premium around $0.99 per managed resource per month, with self-hosted Enterprise quoted (the legacy user-based free plan reached end of life in 2026). It competes with Pulumi, AWS CloudFormation, and OpenTofu (its open-source fork), differentiating on ecosystem breadth, maturity, and HCL.