As you might have already learned, Terraform stores information about the infrastructure managed by it by using state files. By default, if we run Terraform code in a directory named /code/tf, it will record state in a file named /code/tf/terraform.tfstate file. This file contains data in JSON format which contains information about resources mentioned in the configuration files from the real-world infrastructure. Using this file, terraform knows what has been deployed and compare that to what has been mentioned in the configuration files, and come up with a plan on what needs to be changed. So its very critical that terraform is referring to correct state file, which ideally should be 1:1 mapping of real-world infrastructure.

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