6. Resources

A Terraform resource is a block that describes an infrastructure object. For example, you may have a “resource” that describes a virtual-machine in Azure. The resource would describe everything about that VM, like the number of CPU cores, amount of memory, disk size, and number of interfaces. Terraform will send that resource definition to the appropriate provider so that the described object can be created.

Example

Here is a very simple example of a resource block:

resource "aws_instance" "web" {
  ami           = "ami-a1b2c3d4"
  instance_type = "t2.micro"
}

Official Documentation

The official Terraform documentation for Resource blocks can be found here

Resources are easily the most common element of Terraform configuration object. All of the resources supported by a particular provider are described in the provider documentation. For example, here is the documentation for the azurerm_linux_virtual_machine resource.

Note

If you review the documentation you’ll notice that the example near the top starts with the creation of the a virtual-network, followed by a subnet, an interface, and finally an example of the resource we are actually talking about. This is a common theme in the Terraform documentation. Terraform examples commonly include every other resource required by the object in question.