Terraform Best Practices for Production Infrastructure
Introduction After managing Terraform codebases across multiple organizations and cloud providers, I’ve compiled these battle-tested best practices. Whether you’re starting fresh or refactoring existing infrastructure, these patterns will help you build maintainable, scalable IaC. Project Structure Standard Module Layout t ├ │ │ │ ├ │ │ │ ├ └ e ─ ─ ─ ─ r ─ ─ ─ ─ r a m ├ ├ └ e ├ ├ └ . R f o ─ ─ ─ n ─ ─ ─ t E o d ─ ─ ─ v ─ ─ ─ e A r u i r D m l n c d r d s p r M - e e o a o e t r a E p s t m t n v a o f . r w p a m / g d m o u b e i r d j r t a n n m e k e s t g - c i / e s / v t n / / e / g r / s i o n # # m m a a i i n n . . t t f f , , v t a e r r i r a a b f l o e r s m . . t t f f , v a o r u s t , p u b t a s c . k t e f n , d . v t e f r s i o n s . t f File Naming Conventions File Purpose main.tf Primary resources and module calls variables.tf Input variable declarations outputs.tf Output value declarations versions.tf Provider and Terraform version constraints locals.tf Local value definitions data.tf Data source declarations backend.tf Backend configuration Module Design Patterns 1. Single Responsibility Each module should do one thing well: ...