One of the features that makes Terraform so powerful is its state. This state, which is the state of the resources you've deployed, sets it apart from other deployment tools, such as Ansible. This state is a file that needs to be stored somewhere. It defaults to local, but you can also store it in Terraform cloud, S3, an HTTP server, or many other potential places. These storage locations are known as "backends." In this lesson, we will configure the backend to store the state locally. This isn't how you would do things in production, but since we're still learning, we will keep it local so we have easy access to it. Let's get started. 

https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/settings/backends/local