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)