Terraform providers are part of the Terraform core binary.
Terraform providers are part of the Terraform core binary.
Terraform providers are not part of the Terraform core binary. The core functionality of Terraform is separated from the providers, which are implemented as plugins. Terraform core communicates with these plugins using remote procedure calls (RPC). This separation allows Terraform to support a wide variety of providers and services by loading the necessary plugins.
Terraform is logically split into two main parts: Terraform Core and Terraform Plugins. Terraform Core uses remote procedure calls (RPC) to communicate with Terraform Plugins, and offers multiple ways to discover and load plugins to use. Terraform Plugins expose an implementation for a specific service, such as AWS, or provisioner, such as bash.