March 15, 2025

Building Infrastructure as Code with Terraform

terraform iac devops

Why Infrastructure as Code Matters

In the world of DevOps, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) isn’t just a best practice — it’s the foundation of reliable, repeatable deployments. After years of managing cloud infrastructure across multiple teams, I’ve found that the biggest challenge isn’t writing Terraform code — it’s organizing it.

Project Structure

Here’s the structure I’ve settled on after several iterations:

infrastructure/
├── modules/
│   ├── networking/
│   ├── compute/
│   └── database/
├── environments/
│   ├── dev/
│   ├── staging/
│   └── production/
└── shared/
    └── backend.tf

Each environment references shared modules but maintains its own state file and variable definitions. This separation ensures that a change in development can’t accidentally affect production.

Key Lessons

  1. State management is critical — Use remote state with locking from day one
  2. Module versioning — Pin your module versions. Semantic versioning for internal modules saves headaches
  3. Plan before apply — Always review terraform plan output, especially in production

What’s Next

In the next post, I’ll dive into how we handle secrets management with Vault and Terraform, and why we moved away from storing secrets in environment variables.