Managing Production Environments with Terraform

It is fitting that the capstone of this book is managing your environments with Terraform as that is probably the most important operational aspect of our solutions’ infrastructure: managing it. All too often, infrastructure as code is used as an expedient way to turn meters and blast solutions into the cloud without a thought given to what would happen the next day and every other day going forward.

This day 1 ops mindset is rampant, and while understandable from a psychological standpoint, the people working with infrastructure as code are inherently builders. We love building new things and are constantly looking for ways to improve how we do so. But I would argue that one of the most important (and often neglected) design considerations for infrastructure-as-code solutions is not scalability, performance, security, or even high availability—it’s operability.

Can we effectively operate our environments without...