How can you maintain idempotency in Terraform configurations?

Maintaining idempotency in Terraform configurations is fundamentally achieved by writing declarative configurations. In Terraform, a declarative approach means you define the desired state of your infrastructure rather than specifying the steps to reach that state. This allows Terraform to manage changes intelligently, ensuring that if you apply the same configuration multiple times, your infrastructure ends up in the same state without unintended side effects.

When you declare resources, Terraform compares the current state of the infrastructure with the desired state specified in your configuration files. If the desired state matches the actual state, no actions are taken, which reinforces the concept of idempotency. This ensures that repeated applications of the same configuration yield the same results, preventing any unwanted modifications.

On the other hand, writing imperative scripts (the first choice) involves specifying exact commands that change the infrastructure imperatively, which does not inherently guarantee that repeated executions will lead to the same outcome. Resource dependencies (the second choice) help Terraform understand the relationships between resources but do not directly ensure idempotency by themselves. Running 'terraform validate' (the fourth choice) checks the configuration for syntax and validity but does not enforce idempotency in terms of resource management. Thus, utilizing declarative configurations is the key practice for achieving idempotency in