This is the scenario that poses a challenge for this team, if they adopt AWS CloudFormation as their standardized method for provisioning public cloud resources, as CloudFormation only supports AWS services and resources, and cannot be used to provision infrastructure on other cloud platforms such as Azure.

The reason why the apply fails after adding a new provider to the configuration and immediately running terraform apply in the CD using the local backend is because Terraform needs to install the necessary plugins first. Terraform providers are plugins that Terraform uses to interact with various cloud services and other APIs. Each provider has a source address that determines where to download it from. When Terraform encounters a new provider in the configuration, it needs to run terraform init first to install the provider plugins in a local directory. Without the plugins, Terraform cannot communicate with the provider and perform the desired actions. Reference = [Provider Requirements], [Provider Installation]

These are examples of infrastructure as code (IaC), which is a practice of managing and provisioning infrastructure through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools.

Explanation
This is the command that lets you experiment with Terraform expressions, by providing an interactive console that allows you to evaluate expressions and see their results. You can use this command to test your expressions before using them in your configuration files.