Taking Terraform off the laptop: shared locked state, a CI pipeline that plans on every pull request and applies on merge, the human approval gate, managed run platforms, drift detection, and cost estimation before the bill.
6 topics
Everything so far assumed one person running apply from a terminal. A team breaks that assumption in three ways at once: two people can write the same state, nobody can see what someone else applied, and a console hotfix made during an incident silently diverges from the code. This chapter is about the machinery that makes Terraform safe with more than one person and more than one environment.
The spine of it is a CI pipeline running against shared, locked, remote state. Every pull request runs plan and posts it for review; merge runs apply against the exact plan that was reviewed; credentials come from OIDC-assumed roles, never stored keys. Around that spine sit the supporting disciplines — a deliberate approval gate, the build-versus-buy call on HCP Terraform, scheduled drift detection, and a dollar figure on every plan before it merges.