Resource Lifecycle

Each Terraform resource is subject to the lifecycle: Create, Update or Recreate, Destroy. When executing terraform apply, each resource:

• which exists in configuration but not in state is created
• which exists in configuration and state and has changed is updated
• which exists in configuration and state and has changed, but cannot updated due to API limitation is destroyed and recreated
• which exists in state, but not (anymore) in configuration is destroyed

The lifecycle behaviour can be modified to some extend using the lifecycle meta argument.