Question

A new engineer on your platform team asks how Terraform decides what actions to take during an apply. Your team writes configuration files that describe the final set of resources they want (three servers, one load balancer, one database) without listing the individual API calls or ordering steps needed to build them. Which characteristic of Terraform's declarative model best explains how this works?

Accepted Answer

You define the desired end state of the infrastructure, and Terraform determines the operations and order required to reach it.

Answer

You write a sequential script of provisioning commands that Terraform executes line by line in the order given.

Answer

Terraform randomly retries creation commands until the infrastructure eventually converges to a working configuration.

Answer

You must manually specify each resource's dependencies and creation order because Terraform cannot infer them.