Providers in Detail

Terraform providers

A provider in Terraform is a connection that allows Terraform to manage infrastructure using a pre-defined interface. This abstraction means the provider is completely separate from the Terraform engine - which understands how to read state from a provider, read HCL code, and work out how to get to the desired state. This allows you to write a provider to connect to anything that has a programmable way to talk to it. All the writer of a provider has to do for each resource they want Terraform to control is provide Terraform with a way to create it, read it, and delete it.

📝Note: Updates are actually optional as Terraform can always delete and then create the resource if the update is not provided.