What is the underlying mechanism that Terraform’s AWS Provider uses to provision resources in AWS?

Question

Does it use AWS CloudFormation, the AWS CLI, or does it do something else like directly make AWS API calls without going through the CLI?

Answer 1

No, it not using the AWS CLI or cloud formation.

AWS terraform use the AWS SDK and here you can see the complete list of dependency for the AWS Terraform provider.

It also uses aws-sdk-go https://github.com/aws/aws-sdk-go

https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-provider-aws