Terraform at Scale

Chapter 1. Bad ’Form!

A Note for Early Release Readers

With Early Release ebooks, you get books in their earliest form—the author’s raw and unedited content as they write—so you can take advantage of these technologies long before the official release of these titles.

This will be the 1st chapter of the final book. Please note that the GitHub repo will be made active later on.

If you’d like to be actively involved in reviewing and commenting on this draft, please reach out to the editor at [e-mail].

It happens all the time: an organization adopted Terraform and has been using it, fairly successfully, for some months or years, when suddenly, no one can push a change. The automation jobs that apply Terraform code are either failing or reporting unexpected changes to the configuration of running instances, or both. Pretty much all new features are blocked until the issue is resolved and the jobs are clean and green. You get your team(s) together on multi-hour long virtual calls to swarm on the issue (despite only two or three engineers really understanding the most complex portions of the codebase, but why should they be punished have all the fun?). Hours turn into days. Meanwhile other meetings are called to discuss (primarily amongst non-technical, unfamiliar parties) why and how and when and why (again) this happened. A week goes by. People have spent nights, weekends, lunches trying to figure out what’s going on. People are fearful of losing their jobs. Then, suddenly, ...