Terraform

Three strengths

• Repeatable. You describe your infrastructure in readable files that can be saved, versioned and reused. 1
• Preview before changing. Terraform shows what it will create, update or destroy, and only goes ahead once you approve. 1
• Works with many platforms. Its providers connect it to virtually any platform or service with an accessible API. 1

What it is

Before software can run, someone has to set up the places it runs: servers, networks, databases and the permissions between them. Done by hand, clicking through a cloud provider's dashboard, that setup is slow to repeat and hard to remember. Infrastructure as code is the alternative. Researchers describe it as "the practice to automatically configure system dependencies and to provision local and remote instances", which in plain terms means writing the setup down as a script and letting software carry it out. 3

Terraform is a tool for doing that. It lets you define both cloud and on-premises resources in human-readable configuration files that you can version and reuse. 1 Its workflow has three steps: you write the description, Terraform plans by listing what it will create, update or destroy, and only on your approval does it apply the changes in the correct order. 1 The plan step is what makes it safe, because nothing changes until a person has seen what's about to happen.

Its co-creator, Mitchell Hashimoto, has said HashiCorp released Terraform 0.1 in July 2014 as an open source, cloud-agnostic infrastructure-as-code tool. 2 Cloud-agnostic means it isn't tied to one provider: through plug-ins called providers it can work with AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and many other services. 1 In 2025, 17.8% of developers surveyed said they use it. 4

We choose it because a setup written as a script is a setup you can rebuild, review and hand over, instead of something that lives in one person's memory.

How we use it

Terraform is the tool we've used to describe and create cloud infrastructure as code, so the environment behind your software can be built the same way each time and reviewed before anything changes. In our past projects we've used it to set up infrastructure on AWS.

It supports both Software Development and Solution Architecture. In software builds it can keep the environment behind your app consistent. In architecture work it turns a design into something repeatable, which supports the scalable and resilient systems we plan for you. It works with clouds such as AWS and Azure.

References

1. HashiCorp, "What is Terraform?", Terraform documentation. https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/intro (accessed 28 October 2026)
2. Mitchell Hashimoto, "The Story of HashiCorp Terraform with Mitchell Hashimoto", HashiCorp, 13 July 2021. https://www.hashicorp.com/en/resources/the-story-of-hashicorp-terraform-with-mitchell-hashimoto (accessed 28 October 2026)
3. Akond Rahman, Rezvan Mahdavi-Hezaveh and Laurie Williams, "Where Are The Gaps? A Systematic Mapping Study of Infrastructure as Code Research", Information and Software Technology, 2018 (arXiv:1807.04872). https://arxiv.org/abs/1807.04872 (accessed 28 October 2026)
4. Stack Overflow, "2025 Developer Survey: Technology", survey.stackoverflow.co, 2025. https://survey.stackoverflow.co/2025/technology (accessed 28 October 2026)