To start with, lets quickly understand Cloud Infrastructure Automation or Infrastructure as cloud, the word to word meaning of Cloud. Cloud in Computer in simple terms means remote/far off/faraway or out of physical reach. Infrastructure in Computer is Servers, Storage, Router, Switches, Firewalls etc. Automation simply means self driven, that is, away from human interference.
Around 2011, AWS came up with cloud formation templates CFT for AWS infrastructure automation which solved the problem of cloud infrastructure creation on a large scale. But , the next day a post on social media, appeared raising the question, what if we want to automate infrastructure on other cloud services like Azure(ARM template), GCP(Deployment Manager),OpenStack(Heat) etc. apart from AWS, will we keep learning individual tools for every cloud provider ??
Now this question was the birthplace of opensource tool what is called as TERRAFORM, a HashiCorp product. Lets deep dive into the word Terraform, it came from Extra Terrestrial activity which simply means out of our house/outside our boundary/outside our territory. Around July 2014, Terraform was launched with automation on AWS and Digital Ocean initially.
Terraform is an Infrastructure as Code (IAC) tool, where you write infrastructure requirements in code and run it, this creates infrastructure in the blink of an eye. Infrastructure as Code(IAC) is the managing(systematic alignment of existing resources/create, delete, reboot etc.) and provisioning(resource allocation like CPU, RAM HDD etc.) of infrastructure through code instead of a manual process.
Terraform is Open Source, its not vendor specific and you can use it on any cloud provider model. Terraform is known for its multi-cloud support, meaning you can use the same configuration code to provision resources on various cloud providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.) and even on-premises infrastructure. This flexibility can be beneficial if your organization uses multiple cloud providers or plans to migrate between them.