Terraform at Scale

Chapter 6. Optimizing State

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Early on, the natural inclination is just to get as many things encoded and automated, orienting the codebase around the architecture, possibly into existing resource or responsibility domains, without thinking specifically about how TF works. Most likely, a sufficiently thought-out separation of concerns, even without strong TF exposure, will be serviceable for large swathes of effort, establishing the vast majority of your infrastructure and running without problems for months and years.

As your TF ecosystem grows and evolves, you may begin to experience challenges with some of the behind-the-scenes operations TF makes to stay consistent. In particular, you may begin to notice unfortunate couplings across your codebase, recurrent incidents of inconsistencies between TF state and the running instances, TF operations that seem to take longer than they should, or all of the above. This chapter reviews various concepts, challenges, and approaches regarding the TF state ...