Benefits of State

The creation and manipulation of resources managed by Terraform need to be tracked in some manner. Terraform achieves this through the implementation of state. When a resource is created, such as an EC2 instance in AWS, Terraform creates an entry in the state that maps the metadata about the resource (such as instance-id) to key/value pairs in the entry. The tracking of resource metadata serves multiple functions.

Idempotence

Each time a Terraform configuration is planned or applied, Terraform checks for any changes required to the environment to match the desired configuration. Only those resources that require changes will be updated, and all other resources ...