> to have a unified interface with a single language for all kinds of cloud infrastructures where the machine you are deploying to can be virtually anything I

> to have a unified interface with a single language for all kinds of cloud infrastructures where the machine you are deploying to can be virtually anything I don't think having a unified interface is the motivation behind Terraform. You still need to understand the underlying resources you are dealing with, Terraform doesn't abstract that at all. The big idea behind Terraform is procedural vs declarative. You can write scripts to bring up all of your infrastructure but what if one of your scripts fails in the middle? What parts of it actually went into effect and which didn't? Can you just re-run it or will the first part now fail because the infrastructure already exists? What if you have several engineers working on the same environment applying scripts that may interfere with one another? What if there was an incident and you made some manual changes and now production is out of sync with what is represented in the script? What if you made some complicated infrastructure changes and you broke something and want to bring everything back to exactly how it was before? Declarative infrastructure answers all of those questions. It lets you keep track of what the current state of your infrastructure is, and what you want it to be. It automatically identifies areas where the two don't match up and serves as a forcing function for documenting changes to your infrastructure. Declarative infrastructure is more complicated than procedural because bringing up infrastructure is a procedural process so you need a tool to make it into a declarative one and that is not always easy. But if your team's needs get complex enough the tradeoff is well worth it. I honestly can't even imagine life without it. As a bonus it makes it easy to ship complete infrastructure solutions as re-usable modules that you can compose.