26 Terraform Hacks for Effective Infrastructure Automation (With Examples)

A checklist for Cloud Engineers to live by

Terraform has emerged as a powerful tool for automating provisioning and managing resources across various cloud providers. While many users start with the basics, there are numerous advanced techniques and hacks that can elevate your Terraform expertise to new heights.

In this article, we’ll explore 26 advanced Terraform hacks and strategies, complete with code snippets and real-world examples, to help you optimize your infrastructure provisioning process, improve efficiency, and reduce complexity.

1 — Utilize Terraform Modules for Reusability

One of the fundamental principles of Terraform is reusability. Creating custom modules that encapsulate resource configurations allows you to reuse code and simplify your infrastructure definitions. Let’s see an example of how to create a custom module for an AWS VPC:

# main.tf
module "my_vpc" {
  source = "./modules/vpc"
  cidr_block = "10.0.0.0/16"
  region     = "us-east-1"
}

# modules/vpc/main.tf
resource "aws_vpc" "main" {
  cidr_block = var.cidr_block
  tags = {
    Name = "MyVPC"
  }
}

2 — Leverage Terraform Workspaces

Workspaces allow you to manage multiple environments (e.g., dev, staging, production) with the same Terraform codebase. This…