Question

Your team deploys a VPC, subnets, and EC2 instances in a single Terraform configuration. You did not write any explicit 'depends_on' statements, yet Terraform consistently creates the VPC before the subnets and the subnets before the instances. During a later 'terraform destroy', the resources are removed in the reverse order. Which mechanism, informed by the state file, explains this ordering behavior?

Accepted Answer

Terraform builds a dependency graph from resource attribute references and uses it, together with state, to determine correct create and destroy ordering

Answer

Terraform processes resources alphabetically by their resource block names within the configuration file

Answer

The provider plugin enforces a fixed creation sequence for all resource types it manages

Answer

Terraform executes resources strictly top-to-bottom in the order they appear in the .tf files