The example you gave is of a wrong way to write Terraform; you should be able to query the cloud API using using data sources. In your case (getting a VNet) tha

The example you gave is of a wrong way to write Terraform; you should be able to query the cloud API using using data sources. In your case (getting a VNet) that would be this: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/azurerm/latest/docs/data-sources/resources https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/azurerm/la... In case you need to get the metadata of a resource group you can use this: https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/azurerm/latest/docs/data-sources/resource_group https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/azurerm/la... I am a very happy Terraform user, here are the benefits for me: * Very simple workflow that helps prevent unintended consequences - first you write your code, generate a plan, inspect it carefully and only then apply. It is easy to work in a team setting where you can have one person write modules and others supply variables to them. * I personally don't want to burden myself with Azure Resource Manager, CloudFormation or any other vendor specific IAC tool. * I don't like other people's bash; there are tools like shell check, but usually a larger infra codebase becomes an awful ad-hoc mess of ENV variables and clever hacks. And infrastructure code is nasty to test and refactor. Try to keep it simple as possible; anytime you are fighting Terraform it usually means there is a much simpler way to do it. And if there is inherent complexity it could be the wrong thing to do. In case you need very dynamic behaviour (basically a part of an application) I advise the following - put in terraform the things that are not likely to change often or where the cost of breakage is higher - your virtual networks, DNS configuration, Load Balancers, VPNs, Autoscaling groups, important alerts, etc. Manage more ephemeral workloads in a more general purpose language if there is no straightforward way to do it in the official APIs. I am also very happy user of the AWS CLI in some cases + the cognitect aws libraries for Clojure. However if you need to do something very dynamic it is also likely to be wrong.