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An enterprise is establishing an Infrastructure as Code (IaC) strategy on Google Cloud to manage multi-tier compute workloads across development, testing, and production environments.
The infrastructure team has outlined the following technical requirements:
Which operational approach best fulfills these requirements?
Use configuration management tools like Ansible or Puppet to imperatively build VM instances, without external state files or cloud provider plugins
Author shell scripts utilizing the Google Cloud CLI (gcloud) committed to Git, and run imperative scripts directly against each target environment
Manually create golden machine images in the Google Cloud console for each environment and deploy Compute Engine instances from the console UI
Store declarative Terraform configurations in a Git repository, package standardized compute topologies into reusable Terraform modules, and maintain remote state in Cloud Storage buckets
Use configuration management tools like Ansible or Puppet to imperatively build VM instances, without external state files or cloud provider plugins
Author shell scripts utilizing the Google Cloud CLI (gcloud) committed to Git, and run imperative scripts directly against each target environment
Manually create golden machine images in the Google Cloud console for each environment and deploy Compute Engine instances from the console UI
Store declarative Terraform configurations in a Git repository, package standardized compute topologies into reusable Terraform modules, and maintain remote state in Cloud Storage buckets
HashiCorp Terraform is a declarative Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that lets platform engineers define, provision, and manage Google Cloud infrastructure using HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL). Declarative configurations describe the intended end-state of infrastructure rather than sequential execution scripts.
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StudyCertsterraform.tfstate), typically stored centrally in a secure Cloud Storage bucket backend. The state file maps declared configuration objects to real-world cloud resources, tracks metadata, detects configuration drift, and allows Terraform to determine necessary creates, updates, and destroys during terraform plan and terraform apply operations.terraform plan command provides visibility into pending infrastructure changes before modifications are applied to live environments.This approach combines reusable architectural templates, strict state tracking, and source control governance, providing the highest level of repeatability, security, and lifecycle management for Google Cloud infrastructure.