Question
The terms provisioner and provider seem similar. How would one be compared versus the other? Are provisioners and providers in Terraform the same? If not, how are they different?
Answer
Provisioners in Terraform run commands and do various things to a given server (e.g., transfer a file, run a shell command, run chef-client commands). (This was taken from page 213 of Terraform: Up & Running, 2nd Edition by Yevgeniy Brikman (O'Reilly), Copyright 2019, 978-1-492-04690-5.)
Providers are resources to create platforms, infrastructure, or applications on. Examples of providers include AWS, Azure, GCP and Kubernetes. To read more about providers, see https://registry.terraform.io/browse/providers