Terraform Best Practices

Keep it modular

Break infrastructure into reusable modules — networking, compute, storage — each with clear inputs and outputs.

Use remote state

Store state in a backend like S3 with locking via DynamoDB so your team never overwrites each other.

terraform {
  backend "s3" {
    bucket = "my-tf-state"
    key    = "prod/terraform.tfstate"
    region = "us-east-1"
  }
}

Other habits

• Pin provider versions.
• Run terraform fmt and validate in CI.
• Never hard-code secrets — use variables and a secret manager.