Terraform is part of a movement called "Infrastructure as Code" (IaC) which allows engineers to define their cloud infrastructure using code.

This is extremely useful as it allows you to:

• version infrastructure changes

• automate resource and configuration creation and management

• have reproducible environments (think production and staging envs, or deploying a new production env to another datacenter)

Terraform (and OpenTofu) is different to most IaC project as it is agnostic of cloud providers: you can use it to deploy infrastructure to multiple providers, where their competitors are limited to their own platform (I think of AWS's Cloud Development Kit)

Its for easily deploying virtual machines. You can specify the VM specs, give it an install disk and some instructions, and it will churn out a VM for you.

Honestly, it's not great in my experience, nothing about it is common or portable, so if you change your VM host, it might all fall apart.