Top 10 Terraform tips for Infrastructure Automation

Introduction:

Terraform has become an essential tool for infrastructure as code (IaC), empowering DevOps teams to provision, manage, and scale infrastructure with ease. As Terraform continues to gain popularity, it’s crucial to unlock its full potential through advanced tips and tricks that can help you optimize your workflow and improve your infrastructure deployments.

In this blog, we’ll cover 10 Terraform tips that every user should know — from mastering dynamic resources to leveraging multi-provider configurations for disaster recovery scenarios. Whether you’re a beginner or an experienced Terraform user, these tips will enhance your productivity and make your infrastructure code more efficient and manageable. Let’s dive in!

Terraform Tips — Tip #1: Use of depends_on

When working with Terraform, most of the time, it automatically figures out the order in which resources should be created. But in some cases, you know that one resource must be created after another, and Terraform doesn’t handle it by itself. That’s where depends_on comes in.

I’ve personally found it very useful while creating an AWS EKS cluster using Terraform. If you’ve worked with EKS, you might have faced situations where certain dependencies weren’t handled correctly, causing issues in the cluster setup. Using depends_on, I was able to make sure that resources were created in the right order.