Terraform Associate 003: HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate (003)

These are examples of infrastructure as code (IaC), which is a practice of managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools.

The key principle of infrastructure as code that is not listed among the options isgolden images. Golden images are pre-configured, ready-to-use virtual machine images that contain a specific set of software and configuration. They are often used to create multiple identical instances of the same environment, such as for testing or production. However, golden images are not a principle of infrastructure as code, but rather a technique that can be used with or without infrastructure as code. The other options are all key principles of infrastructure as code, as explained below:

Self-describing infrastructure: This means that the infrastructure is defined in code that describes its desired state, rather than in scripts that describe the steps to create it. This makes the infrastructure easier to understand, maintain, and reproduce.

Idempotence: This means that applying the same infrastructure code multiple times will always result in the same state, regardless of the initial state. This makes the infrastructure consistent and predictable, and avoids errors or conflicts caused by repeated actions.

This is how you specify a module's version when publishing it to the public Terraform Module Registry, as it uses the tags from your version control system (such as GitHub or GitLab) to identify module versions. You need to use semantic versioning for your tags, such asv1.0.0.

This is how the Terraform Cloud integration differs from other state backends such as S3, Consul, etc., as it allows you to perform remote operations on Terraform Cloud's servers instead of your local machine. The other options are either incorrect or irrelevant.

Any user with permission to apply a plan can apply it, not only the user that generated it. This allows for collaboration and delegation of tasks among team members.

This is what this code does, by using the pessimistic constraint operator (~>), which specifies an acceptable range of versions for a provider or module.