Terraform & Infrastructure as Code

The state you are probably in

Some of your infrastructure is in Terraform. Some was added by hand during an incident and never brought back. The plan output is hundreds of lines, so nobody reads it, so nobody catches the destroy that should not be there.

That is the normal midpoint, and it is fixable — but it is fixed by narrowing the blast radius first, not by a rewrite.

What we do about it

We import what exists, split state so a mistake in one environment cannot touch another, and get terraform plan running on every pull request so review means something again. Only then do we refactor modules.

The test we hold ourselves to is simple: a new environment can be created from an empty project with one command, and the plan on your existing environments shows zero changes. Until both are true, the work is not finished.

A word on drift

Drift is not a moral failing — someone fixed production at 2 a.m., which was the right call. What matters is that the change gets back into code within days, and that you can detect it in the first place. We set up that detection so the gap between reality and code stays small enough to be honest about.