Does Terraform uses AWS cloudformation under the hood?

Terraform Providers AWS
1

Hey all, I had a discussion with one of colleagues over Terraform and Cloudformation and he mentioned that Terraform is basically an abstraction over Cloudformation. I was wondering if Terraform actually uses Cloudformation under the hood and interacts directly the the aws resources API? Couldn’t find this information anywhere so wanted to ask here!

Thanks everyone!

2

Terraform use Cloud provider api’s to interact.

3

Yea but does it use the resource api directly or use Cloudformation API to create the resource?

For example if I use terraform to create an EC2 instance, does it interact with EC2 API or Cloudformation API to create the EC2 instance?

4

While you can use Terraform to manage CloudFormation stacks, when managing other resources (e.g. EC2 or EKS) it doesn’t interact with CF at all and just uses the standard APIs for whatever service you are managing.

CloudFormation could not exist and Terraform would still work happily.