A junior admin accidentally deleted some cloud instances. What does Terraform do when you run terraform apply?

A junior admin accidentally deleted some cloud instances. What does Terraform do when you run terraform apply?

• A. Build a completely brand new set of infrastructure
• B. Tear down the entire workspace infrastructure and rebuild it
• C. Rebuild only the instances that were deleted
• D. Stop and generate an error message about the missing instances

Answer: (C)

Terraform tracks what should exist based on your configuration and its state. When some cloud instances are deleted outside Terraform, Terraform detects drift and, on apply, will reconcile by recreating only the resources that are missing to bring the real infrastructure back in line with the configuration. It doesn’t tear down everything or rebuild the entire environment, and it won’t error out just because something was deleted. So, the deleted instances get recreated, leaving other resources as they are.

Terraform tracks what should exist based on your configuration and its state. When some cloud instances are deleted outside Terraform, Terraform detects drift and, on apply, will reconcile by recreating only the resources that are missing to bring the real infrastructure back in line with the configuration. It doesn’t tear down everything or rebuild the entire environment, and it won’t error out just because something was deleted. So, the deleted instances get recreated, leaving other resources as they are.