Orchestration is the automated configuration, management, and coordination of computer systems, applications, and services. Orchestration helps IT to more easily manage complex tasks and workflows.It aims to consolidate recurring/repeatable tasks and processes. you can orchestrate tasks that take a human effort of minutes or hours in milliseconds with 100% repeatability
In today's cloud era orchestration is a process to programmatically manage the interconnections and interactions among workloads on public and private cloud infrastructure.
Automation refers to software solutions automating computing services' installation, configuration, and management processes
Configuration focuses on Software and installation management, These installations are done via tools such ansible, puppet, etc on the existing compute images/servers, ex: installation of packages, starting& stopping of services, installing scripts or config files on the instance)
Terraform is considered to be orchestrator. It is designed to provision the compute instances themselves, leaving the job of configuring those compute instances to other tools such as Ansible, Puppet, Chef, etc. Orchestration addresses the requirement to provision environments at a higher level than configuration management. Orchestrate multiple services/providers in a single definition and Uses a single solution that supports multiple services, In other words, it is next-gen superset of the Configuration Orchestration system
Terraform = Planet earth +having form of Coined by jack Williamson Collison orbit
The very usage is to terraform = to shape planets