Terraform Best Practices

What this best practices guide is

A practical guide to Terraform best practices for people who manage cloud infrastructure as code. It covers structuring and formatting configuration, pinning Terraform, providers and modules, storing state remotely with locking, keeping secrets out of state, writing modules and refactoring them safely, and a review workflow with plans, tests and policy.

It has 6 chapters and 24 practices, each with why it matters, what to do and what to avoid. For developers and platform engineers.

Chapter by chapter

1. Structure and style (4 practices)

How to lay out files, name things and format code so every Terraform change is easy to read in a pull request.

2. Versions and dependencies (4 practices)

How to pin Terraform itself, providers and modules so that a plan run next month uses the same code as the one you reviewed today.

3. State: remote, locked and split (4 practices)

Terraform state is the map between your code and real resources. These practices keep it shared, safe from concurrent runs, recoverable and small enough to reason about.

4. Secrets and credentials (4 practices)

How to give Terraform the credentials it needs and pass secrets to resources without leaving them in Git, logs, state or plan files.

5. Modules and refactoring (4 practices)

When to write a module, how to repeat resources safely, and how to rename or move resources without Terraform destroying them.

6. Workflow, tests and policy (4 practices)

How changes move from a branch to production: plans in review, applying exactly what was reviewed, tests for modules and checks on deployed infrastructure.

How it works on Sefism

The guide reads like a short course: a syllabus, then one chapter per page in a focused reader, with a quiz at the end of each chapter for members. The opening chapters are open to everyone. Adding it to your account uses credits, opens every chapter and keeps your progress.

Every claim is checked against the sources listed on the page (8 cited).