How to manage Terraform state

Update: I took this blog post series, expanded it, and turned it into a book called Terraform: Up & Running!

In Part 1 of the Comprehensive Guide to Terraform series, we explained why we picked Terraform as our IAC tool of choice and not Chef, Puppet, Ansible, SaltStack, or CloudFormation. In Part 2 of the series, we introduced the basics of Terraform in a step-by-step tutorial that showed how to deploy a cluster of web servers and a load balancer on AWS. In this post, we discuss how to manage terraform state:

The way Terraform manages state has a profound impact on file layout, isolation, and locking, so this is a must-read for anyone working on a Terraform project.