As teams scale their cloud operations, the complexity of infrastructure management grows fast. Tools like Terraform and Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) frameworks help bring consistency but they can also introduce new risks if not used with the right practices.
Here are a few lessons I’ve learned that leaders should keep in mind when guiding teams that work with Terraform and IaC:
1. Choose trusted components
Encourage your engineers to use well-maintained, widely adopted modules. Unverified community code can create hidden technical debt that shows up at the worst time.
2. Standardize configurations
Keeping all environment variables and configurations in one central place reduces drift between environments and makes onboarding new engineers easier.
3. Version everything
Treat infrastructure the same way you treat code—tag, review, and track changes in Git. This improves collaboration and rollback safety.
4. Prioritize readability and maintainability
Modern Terraform features like for_each simplify resource management and make intent clearer for reviewers. Clean code pays off long-term.
5. Scale complexity responsibly
Tools like Terragrunt can be useful, but they also add overhead. Use them only when your environment truly demands it.
6. Promote tagging discipline
Default provider-level tagging not only helps with cost tracking and compliance but also improves visibility across multiple teams.
7. Consider modern alternatives
OpenTofu, a community-driven Terraform fork, removes certain syntax limitations and offers more flexibility for large-scale deployments.
8. Make “plan before apply” non-negotiable
Every change to infrastructure should go through review. Automation is powerful, but blind automation can be dangerous.
9. Invest in outputs and documentation
When teams output resources and reference them properly, it builds transparency—everyone knows where configurations come from and how environments connect.
Why it matters:
Consistent infrastructure practices reduce deployment risk, improve collaboration between teams, and make scaling predictable. The biggest gains come from enforcing small, reliable habits not new tools.
If you lead a team working with Terraform or IaC, ask this simple question:
Do we understand exactly what happens before every deployment?
That question alone can prevent hours of downtime and unexpected costs.