Site reliability engineer Matt Ouille’s article about terraform state files. Terraform is a tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. They’re formatted in regular JSON but carry a lot of metadata that helps Terraform plan and predict what will happen with your infrastructure.
All infrastructure orchestrators have to work off of some sort of state. Interpreting live infrastructure state is complicated and sluggish at scale so many of them resort to some sort of centrally hosted file system that indicates this state to them.
State files literally are the single source of truth, as far as Terraform is concerned, in regard to your infrastructure.
The article focuses on:
- State files important things to know
- State file contents and jargon
- State file separation
- Workspaces
Good overview and interesting read!
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