Terraform state tracks the relationship between configuration and real infrastructure. Mismanaged state causes drift, conflicts, and deployment failures. Establishing robust state management practices early prevents painful problems as infrastructure grows and teams scale.
Remote State Configuration
Remote state backends enable team collaboration and provide state locking preventing concurrent modifications. S3 with DynamoDB locking offers reliable AWS-native storage. Terraform Cloud provides managed state with additional features. Azure Blob Storage and Google Cloud Storage serve their respective ecosystems.
- Always use remote state backends for team projects—local state doesn't scale
- Enable state locking to prevent concurrent modifications corrupting state
- Encrypt state at rest since it contains sensitive resource information
- Implement state backup strategies protecting against accidental deletion
- Use workspaces or separate state files for environment isolation
Drift Detection and Remediation
Infrastructure drift occurs when resources change outside Terraform. Regular terraform plan runs detect drift by comparing state to actual infrastructure. Automated drift detection in CI pipelines catches unauthorized changes. Remediate drift by either importing changes into Terraform or reverting infrastructure to match state.