Terraform Best Practices for Production Infrastructure

Terraform scales with your team only when modules, state, and review workflows are intentional. Copy-pasting root modules across environments is how drift and surprise bills accumulate.

Module design and state

• Small composable modules with clear inputs/outputs; environment roots compose them.
• Remote state in S3/GCS with locking; never commit state files to git.
• Separate state per environment or blast-radius boundary to limit apply scope.

CI/CD and security

Run terraform fmt, validate, and plan on every PR. Require approved applies to production via OIDC to your cloud provider, with no long-lived CI secrets. Scan plans with tools like Checkov or tfsec before merge.

Version provider constraints and pin module sources. Upgrades should be scheduled work, not accidental breaking changes during a Friday deploy.