Question

A teammate uses your cloud provider's web console to manually resize a virtual machine that was originally created by Terraform. No one updated the Terraform configuration. During the next 'terraform plan', what allows Terraform to detect that the live infrastructure no longer matches its records?

Accepted Answer

Terraform compares the state file (refreshed against the real resource) to the desired configuration and reports the difference.

Answer

Terraform reads change history from the cloud provider's audit log to identify who modified the VM.

Answer

Terraform re-runs the entire configuration from scratch and destroys any resource it did not create in this run.

Answer

Terraform relies solely on the local configuration files, since state is only used during 'terraform apply'.