Data objects

Sometimes you may need to refer to an attribute that a resource has, without managing the resource.

For example:

• You want to add a record to a domain, the domain already exists.
• You need an IP address of a monitoring/backup/logging server.

In such cases, you can use the data sources.

Here is an example: (shortened to improve readability.)

data "azurerm_dns_zone" "example" {
  name                = "example.com"
}

resource "azurerm_dns_a_record" "www" {
  name                = "www"
  zone_name           = data.azurerm_dns_zone.example.name
  ttl                 = 300
  records             = ["10.0.180.17"]
}

As you can see from the example above

1. Use data instead of resource when finding the resource.
2. just prefix data. to the name of the resouce to refer to it.