Terraform Fundamentals

Why IaC matters (manual vs automated), IaC benefits (consistency, version control, repeatability), Terraform overview (providers, open-source, declarative), comparing Terraform vs Bicep vs CloudFormation vs Pulumi, installing Terraform and verifying with terraform version

HCL blocks (resource, provider, variable, output, data, locals), arguments and attributes, terraform init/plan/apply/destroy workflow, .tf file structure, creating local files with local_file resource, terraform.tfstate basics

Provider configuration and versioning (required_providers, version constraints), resource blocks (type, name, arguments), resource dependencies (implicit via references, explicit via depends_on), resource lifecycle (create_before_destroy, prevent_destroy, ignore_changes), data sources for reading existing infrastructure

Input variables (type, default, description, validation, sensitive), variable types (string, number, bool, list, map, object, tuple), variable precedence (CLI, env, tfvars, default), output values for exposing data, local values for computed expressions, terraform.tfvars and auto.tfvars files

What state is and why it matters, terraform.tfstate file structure, state commands (list, show, mv, rm, pull, push), state locking and why it prevents corruption, remote state backends (concept — local for now, Azure in next course), terraform refresh and state drift detection

Why modules (DRY, reusability, encapsulation), module structure (main.tf, variables.tf, outputs.tf), calling modules (source, version), local modules vs registry modules, module inputs and outputs, terraform get and module caching

String interpolation and templates, built-in functions (file, length, lookup, merge, flatten, try, can), conditional expressions (condition ? true : false), for expressions and for_each, dynamic blocks for repeated nested blocks, count vs for_each tradeoffs