Terraform providers are not part of the Terraform core binary. Providers are distributed separately from Terraform itself and have their own release cadence and version numbers. Providers are plugins that Terraform uses to interact with various APIs, such as cloud providers, SaaS providers, and other services. You can find and install providers from the Terraform Registry, which hosts providers for most major infrastructure platforms. You can also load providers from a local mirror or cache, or develop your own custom providers. To use a provider in your Terraform configuration, you need to declare it in the provider requirements block and optionally configure its settings in the provider block. Reference = : Providers - Configuration Language | Terraform : Terraform Registry - Providers Overview | Terraform