Terraform at scale

Terraform is a wonderful tool for describing infrastructure as code. It’s fast, flexible, automatically resolves dependencies, and is rapidly improving.

But in some ways, Terraform is flexible like AWS is flexible. You can do pretty much anything, but it’s also easy to shoot yourself in the foot if you aren’t careful.

In the past year, we’ve started managing thousands of resources with Terraform, allowing a lot more of the dev team to change the underlying infrastructure. During that time, we’ve learned a lot about how to set up our terraform modules so that they are easy to manage and reuse.

This talk covers how we manage tfstate, separate environments, specific module definitions, and how use terraform to boot new services in production. I also discuss the challenges we’re currently facing, and how we plan to attack them going forward.