Terraform serves to translate a descriptive statement about a desired infrastructure state into the sequence of API calls that will bring about that state.

Given something like "I want three auto-scaling groups, each containing a minimum of three instances of type m4.xlarge, in the AWS us-west-2 region. And I want an S3 bucket that has permissions set up so that only the code running on those instances can read and write to the bucket. And I want a load balancer between all of them. And I want the instances to run Ubuntu 18.04 and to install these 6 dependencies on startup. And I want a large pepperoni pizza[1]." Terraform will read your credentials and make it happen.

[1] https://github.com/ndmckinley/terraform-provider-dominos

Just curious: what exactly about the description on the website is unclear?

> Provision and Manage any Infrastructure Use infrastructure as code to consistently provision any cloud, infrastructure, and service.

The terms "provision", "manage", "infrastructure" and "service" alone can each have 10s of different meanings. Hence if you multiply it out that sentence could have 10000s of different meanings.

Hence it's meaningless to me.

Both CloudFormation and Terraform are tools that allow a dev to define Cloud Resources (databases, networks, permissions, instances, all that) as code/markup, and then run those markup files through their respective engines (CloudFormation or Terraform) and have those resources get created/modified/whatever.

They both have their drawbacks, Terraform obviously suffers from not being a first-class service to AWS (since their service CloudFormation is a direct competitor). It is also possible to accidentally discard your Cloud "state" file, that keeps track of every instance that already exists and its current state (so TF can do a "diff" on what is there vs. what you're trying to apply), which definitely causes some headaches. In my experience the benefits of the design decisions from the tool far far outweigh any of the cons.

On the contrary, I have never had a good experience with CloudFormation. The workflow is long/slow, some of the AWS Best Practices are hilariously bad (looking at you "Paste this entire Python file as a text string into a yaml file), and more than a few times have I gotten into a state where CF-generated instances cannot be deleted and require the intervention of an AWS Rep.

Hey, thanks for the clarification!