Gain insights into Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, sharpen your skills, and prepare for the HashiCorp Terraform Associate certification in a cloud-agnostic way.

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This course is designed to help learners obtain the Terraform Associate certification from HashiCorp. 

You’ve likely picked up this course because you dabbled in Terraform as a hobbyist or in a
development environment, and you’re excited about the possibilities of deploying Infrastructure 
as Code (IaC). It will enable you to sharpen your skills and prove your knowledge with a certification from HashiCorp. Terraform is an amazing tool to deploy Infrastructure as Code in a cloud-agnostic way. We’re excited to share our accumulated knowledge with you through this course.

HashiCorp Terraform Certified Associate Preparation Guide

# Terraform architecture

Terraform is written in the **Go programming language (Golang)** and provided as a single binary that includes core components required to parse and deploy Terraform configurations. It doesn’t include the code necessary to interact with various providers and provisioners. That code is supplied via plugins. Each plugin is executed as a separate process communicating with the core Terraform binary using an RPC interface.


>**Note**: Many providers’ codes used to be bundled into the Terraform binary. This caused the binary to bloat as more providers were added and forced a new version of Terraform each time a provider wanted to add or update a feature. HashiCorp shifted to a plugin architecture to lean out the Terraform binary and allow the providers to update at their own cadence.


Plugins keep the Terraform binary relatively small, minimize the potential attack surface, and simplify the debugging of core Terraform code. This allows providers and provisioners to develop their plugins separately and delineates between what Terraform is meant to do and the plugins.

# Key takeaways
Terraform makes use of plugins for its providers and provisioners instead of bundling them in the core binary.


# Demonstration using multiple providers

We can proceed in two different ways:
+ We can use multiple different providers in a configuration.
+ We can use multiple instances of the same provider.


## Multiple different providers

Even the most basic configurations will likely use multiple different providers. Let’s take the
following configuration as an example:


Learn about the plugin-based architecture of Terraform.

Introduction to the Course

Introduction to Infrastructure as Code

Basics of Terraform

Outside the Workflow: Using the Terraform CLI

Terraform Modules

Navigate Terraform Workflow

Implement and Maintain State

Read, Generate, and Modify Configuration

Understand Terraform Enterprise Capabilities

Conclusion

Plugin-based Architecture

Terraform architecture