The lifecycle meta-argument in Terraform customizes the behavior of resources during creation, update, and deletion. It includes settings such as create_before_destroy, which ensures a new resource is created before the old one is destroyed, preventing downtime. prevent_destroy protects resources from accidental deletion, and ignore_changes specifies attributes to ignore during updates, allowing external modifications without triggering Terraform changes. These options provide fine-grained control over resource management, ensuring that the desired state of infrastructure is maintained with minimal disruption and precise handling of resource lifecycles.
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