Terraform on dplabs — Software Engineering & Technology Consultancy

Infrastructure as Code Is Software

Mon, 01 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Infrastructure as Code emerged as a response to the problem of undocumented, inconsistent, manually-managed infrastructure. Click-ops servers where nobody knows what’s actually configured. Snowflake environments that differ from production in undocumented ways. Infrastructure that can’t be reproduced.

IaC solved these problems by treating infrastructure as code. The irony is that many teams write infrastructure code with none of the engineering rigor they apply to application code. No reviews, no tests, no code quality standards, no documentation. The result: IaC that has the same problems as the click-ops it replaced, plus the added complexity of Terraform state files.

Terraform: Modules, State, and the Hidden Complexity

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Terraform is the dominant infrastructure as code tool for AWS, GCP, and Azure workloads. Getting started is straightforward. Operating it at scale — across multiple teams, environments, and hundreds of resources — surfaces complexity that the getting-started tutorials don’t address.

This article focuses on the operational lessons: state management, module architecture, and the patterns that keep Terraform manageable as infrastructure grows.

Note: Terraform is developed by HashiCorp under the BSL license. OpenTofu is the open-source MIT-licensed fork, API-compatible with Terraform 1.5. For teams that require a fully open-source toolchain, OpenTofu is the alternative to evaluate.