Best practices for terraform

• AWS
• Azure

Terraform Best Practices for Cloud users.

Table of Contents

• Run terraform command with var-file
• Manage remote backend for tfstate files
• Manage multiple Terraform modules and environments easily with Terragrunt
• Visualize Tf resource configuration or execution plan using the Tf Graph

the READM for terraform version 0.11 and less has been renamed to README.0.11.md

Run terraform command with var-file

$ cat config/dev.tfvars

name = "dev-stack"
tag_team_name = "hello-world"
 
$ terraform plan -var-file=config/dev.tfvars

With var-file, you can easily manage environment (dev/stag/uat/prod) variables.

With var-file, you avoid running terraform with long list of key-value pairs ( -var foo=bar )

Manage remote backend for tfstate files

Terraform doesn't support Interpolated variables in terraform backend config, normally you write a seperate script to define a backend storage name for different environments, but I recommend to hard code it.

• Remote Backend - AWS S3
• Remote Backend - Azure Blob Storage

Manage multiple Terraform modules and environments easily with Terragrunt

Terragrunt is a thin wrapper for Terraform that provides extra tools for working with multiple Terraform modules. https://www.gruntwork.io

• Terragrunt - AWS QuickStart
• Terragrunt - Azure QuickStart - Coming Soon

Visualize Tf resource configuration or execution plan using the Tf Graph

the Graph is great tool to visualize resource dependencies especially useful for complex Tf configurations - get started here