What is the primary purpose of Terraform?

The primary purpose of Terraform is to provision and manage infrastructure as code. This allows users to define their infrastructure using a declarative configuration language, which simplifies the process of managing infrastructure resources. With Terraform, users can create, update, and version control their infrastructure in a consistent and repeatable manner, making it easier to manage complex cloud environments.

This approach to infrastructure management provides several advantages, such as enabling collaboration among teams through versioning, reducing the likelihood of errors by automating resource management, and promoting best practices in infrastructure deployment.

While creating software development environments and providing cloud cost management solutions are important tasks in software development and operations, they are not the primary purpose of Terraform. Terraform's focus is on infrastructure provisioning and management, which distinguishes it from other tools that might cater specifically to those different aspects of the software development lifecycle. Compiling code into applications is unrelated to Terraform's functionality, as Terraform is not designed for code compilation or application building.