There’s an excellent introductory series on Terraform over at Gruntwork, and apart from anything else it has a very clear introduction to what the different tools in this space do.
I recommend the blog, but here’s a quick summary of some key terms:
| Provisioning | Configuring |
|---|---|
| Provision the servers. | Install and mange software on existing servers. |
| Orchestration. | Configuration Management. |
| Terraform, CloudFormation. | Chef, Puppet, Ansible. |
| Talk to the datacentre (e.g. vSphere, OpenStack) | Talk to the server (e.g. Linux, Windows) |