Infrastructure-as-Code is no longer optional. Companies that aim to run and scale their cloud infrastructure seriously rely on Terraform. But with growing success and increasing complexity, a critical question arises: how large or small should a Terraform state actually be?
A state that is too large blocks teams, slows down processes, and creates unnecessary risk. A state that is too small, on the other hand, leads to unnecessary overhead and fragile consistency. The goal is to find the right balance - not too much, not too little, but just right. Welcome to the Goldilocks principle for Terraform.
Read more: Terraform @ Scale - Part 2: The Art of Optimal State Sizing
Managing Terraform infrastructure becomes particularly challenging when it spans multiple business units or even different customer organizations.
In such scenarios, it is no longer sufficient to simply set up individual workspaces or pipelines in a technically clean manner. Instead, decision-makers, CTOs, architects, and senior engineers require clearly structured responsibilities, strict governance, and fully automated processes to ensure consistency, security, and efficiency. We have already discussed the separation of states in detail, but let us briefly summarize the key points once again.
Read more: Terraform @ Scale - Part 1e: Scaling Across Organizational Boundaries
A respected SME, a printing company from the canton of Obwalden with 30 employees, loses all data – including backups – due to the mistake of an external service provider. The damage: over 750,000 CHF. The company is now history, and in March, bankruptcy was filed citing this incident.
The case made headlines in the press because, according to reports, the devastating damage was caused by an IT issue that should never have occurred in the first place. The causes were too fundamental and too obvious to be accepted as an acceptable risk.
This demonstrates how severe the consequences of inadequately secured IT processes can be. Especially in industries where IT infrastructures and IT workflows are not considered core competencies essential for production, such risks are not easy to recognize and avoid.
Such risks and incidents are not just IT problems. In today's world, they affect the fundamental substance of every company.
Read more: Keeping IT Risks Under Control – Before Your Company Faces a Crisis
Remote states are a powerful tool for controlled information sharing across teams and tenants. Especially in complex cloud environments with multiple areas of responsibility, they enable transparency, reusability and scalability. At the same time, they pose risks: faulty states, access issues and unresolved dependencies can compromise the stability of the entire infrastructure. This article demonstrates how to avoid these challenges and how to lay the foundation for reliable, automated infrastructure through clear structures and proven practices.
Read more: Terraform @ Scale - Part 1d: Pitfalls and Best Practices in Multi-Tenant Environments
Through a combination of carefully structured remote backends, thoughtful output design, and targeted use of the terraform_remote_state data source, you can establish a controlled information flow between different tenant levels - all without compromising the isolation of individual tenants.
Effectively using remote state for information exchange between organizational units requires a well-thought-out configuration of the Terraform environment. Central to this is the selection and setup of a suitable storage backend for storing state data in what are known as state files.
Read more: Terraform @ Scale - Part 1c: Practical Implementation of Remote State Data Flows
More Articles …
- Terraform @ Scale - Part 1b: Multi-Tenancy Architectural Example for Modular Cloud Infrastructures
- Terraform @ Scale - Part 1a: Multi-Tenancy - Inheriting Information Across Organizational Units and Customers
- Nomad: Modern and Lightweight Workload Orchestration for Enterprises
- HashiCorp Consul: Modern Enterprise Zero Trust Networking - An Overview
