what is terraform cloud

Terraform Cloud is a hosted service developed by HashiCorp that provides a collaborative workspace for teams to use Terraform, an open-source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) software tool. It helps teams manage infrastructure provisioning, compliance, and management across various cloud providers, data centers, and services. Terraform Cloud removes many of the complexities in trying to maintain your own Terraform state files in a multi- team, collaborative Terraform environment. It manages Terraform runs in a consistent and reliable environment, and includes easy access to shared state and secret data, access controls for approving changes to infrastructure, a private registry for sharing Terraform modules, detailed policy controls for governing the contents of Terraform configurations, and more. It also provides remote state management, which securely stores and manages the state of your infrastructure, enabling collaboration and preventing conflicts. Terraform Cloud is available as a hosted service, and small teams can sign up for free to connect Terraform to version control, share variables, run Terraform in a stable remote environment, and securely store remote state. Paid editions allow for more users, create teams with different levels of permissions, and collaborate more effectively.