Question

A DevOps engineer runs 'terraform apply' to provision an AWS RDS database. Afterward, a teammate asks how Terraform will know the database's current endpoint, allocated storage, and generated password on the next run without querying every attribute from AWS again. What is the primary mechanism Terraform uses to retain this information between runs?

Accepted Answer

It records the resource attributes and metadata in the state file, which it consults on subsequent operations.

Answer

It re-reads the entire configuration and recomputes all attribute values from the .tf files each time.

Answer

It stores the values as environment variables on the machine that ran the apply.

Answer

It embeds the attribute values as comments inside the provider plugin binary.