About IBM Cloud Provider plug-in for Terraform

To abstract the APIs and complexity of the cloud resource provisioning and management process to the user, cloud providers create a plug-in for Terraform that contains the information for how to connect to the cloud provider and what APIs to call to work with a certain cloud resource. IBM's plug-in is called the IBM Cloud Provider plug-in for Terraform.

The plug-in analyzes the resources that you specified and determines the order in which these resources must be provisioned, including any dependencies that must be considered.

The provider plug-in acts as a bridge between Terraform and IBM Cloud, translating your Terraform configurations into API calls that create, update, or delete IBM Cloud resources.

How does it work?

To use Terraform on IBM Cloud, you must create a Terraform configuration file by using HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) that describes the IBM Cloud resources that you need and how you want to configure them. Store this configuration file in a source code repository that is version-controlled and that allows teams to collaborate, such as GitHub or GitLab. And configure the IBM Cloud Provider plug-in for Terraform.

When you run Terraform commands, the IBM Cloud Provider plug-in:

  1. Reads your configuration - Parses your .tf files to understand desired state
  2. Authenticates with IBM Cloud - Uses your API key to access IBM Cloud services
  3. Plans changes - Creates desired state or compares desired state with current state in case of updating the existing infrastructure
  4. Executes API calls - Creates, updates, or deletes resources via IBM Cloud APIs based on the Terraform execution plan
  5. Updates state - Records the current state of your infrastructure

Next steps

Once you are ready to start using the IBM Cloud Provider plug-in, follow these steps:

  1. Install Terraform CLI
  2. Configure the provider
  3. Create your first configuration
  4. Manage resources

You can further explore the provider documentation for more details.