Terraform Associate: HCP Terraform

What it is

HCP Terraform (formerly Terraform Cloud; Terraform Enterprise is the self-hosted equivalent) is HashiCorp's managed platform that runs Terraform remotely and stores state, adding shared run history, policy enforcement, team permissions and a private module/provider registry. Using Terraform CLI locally does not require it, and a free tier exists.

Core objects and features

• Organization → Projects → Workspaces. A workspace binds a configuration (VCS repo or CLI upload), variables, state and run history.
• Workflows - VCS-driven (a push queues a run), CLI-driven (terraform login, then a cloud block naming organization and workspace), and API-driven.
• Runs - plan, then a confirmation step, then apply. Speculative plans run against pull requests without applying.
• Variables - Terraform variables and environment variables, with a sensitive flag; variable sets share the same variables across many workspaces.
• Remote state sharing - read another workspace's outputs with a terraform_remote_state data source using the remote backend, or the tfe_outputs data source.
• Policy as Code - Sentinel or OPA policies evaluated at plan time, set to advisory or mandatory, with overrides where permitted.
• Agents - self-hosted agent pools for runs that need private network access.
• Also: cost estimation, run triggers, notifications, SSO and team-based permissions.

Traps

• The cloud block effectively replaces a backend block; you cannot use both in the same configuration.
• With a CLI-driven workspace, terraform apply from your terminal still executes remotely by default and streams logs.
• Sentinel policies evaluate the plan, not applied state.
• Storing a variable in the workspace means the same configuration promotes across environments without edits.

Rule of thumb

If the question asks where state and runs live for a team rather than a laptop, the answer is the platform workspace, not local terraform.tfstate.