---
title: "How Terraform Works"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/how-terraform-works-m4paeflla
source_url: https://newsletter.systemdesigncodex.com/p/how-terraform-works
type: article
source: "System Design Codex"
published: 2026-05-05T07:52:59.037Z
updated: 2026-05-05T07:53:17.920Z
tags: ["cloud", "devops", "terraform", "iac"]
reading_time: 4
upvotes: 35
comments: 0
language: en
---

> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# How Terraform Works

**[System Design Codex](https://daily.dev/sources/systemdesigncodex)** · 4 min read · 35 upvotes · 0 comments

## Summary

A beginner-friendly walkthrough of how Terraform works, covering its four main stages: writing infrastructure as code using HCL, previewing changes with terraform plan, applying changes with terraform apply, and managing state. Explains key concepts like providers, resources, variables, modules, idempotency, and remote state backends for team collaboration.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://newsletter.systemdesigncodex.com/p/how-terraform-works>

---

Tags: [#cloud](https://daily.dev/tags/cloud), [#devops](https://daily.dev/tags/devops), [#terraform](https://daily.dev/tags/terraform), [#iac](https://daily.dev/tags/iac)

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