Working with state

If you've read the output of the terraform apply command carefully, you might be really curious about what this part means:

The state of your infrastructure has been saved to the path 
below. This state is required to modify and destroy your 
infrastructure, so keep it safe. To inspect the complete state 
use the `terraform show` command. 
State path: terraform.tfstate

What it means is that Terraform didn't simply create an instance and forget about it. It actually saved everything it knows about this instance to a special file, named the state file. In this file, Terraform stores the state of all the resources it created. This file is saved to the same directory where the Terraform template is, with the .tfstate extension. The format of the state file is simple json. Let's take a look at it piece by piece.

{ 
    "version": 3, 
    "terraform_version": "0.8.2", 
    "serial": 1, 
    "lineage": "65a6dc1b-3f42-4f23-8df1-8b2275602aff...