Terraform

At first, Terraform was just a way to create resources. It lived next to the platform. It supported it. It automated it. Then, quietly, Terraform became the platform. The Shift Was Subtle There was no announcement. No rewrite. No big migration moment. It happened when: new environments required Terraform first access flowed through Terraform definitions changes without Terraform felt unsafe platform discussions started with code Terraform stopped being an implementation detail. It became the source of truth. ...

Terraform does something uncomfortable very well. It preserves mistakes. At first, that feels like a problem. Over time, it becomes one of its biggest strengths. Before Terraform, Mistakes Were Ephemeral Before infrastructure lived in code, mistakes were scattered. Someone changed a setting in the portal. Someone applied a hotfix directly. Someone clicked a checkbox to make something work. Those mistakes disappeared into history. They could not be explained. They could not be repeated. They could not be intentionally fixed. ...

The first Terraform refactor is never about improvement. It is about reckoning. You usually start with good intentions. Clean things up. Add structure. Maybe extract a module or two. Then you run plan. And suddenly you are staring at changes you do not remember making, resources you did not know were connected, and behaviors you cannot confidently explain. That is the real start of Terraform. The Moment Reality Shows Up Early Terraform setups tend to grow organically. ...

Terraform did not make our Azure environment simpler. It did something more important. It made it understandable. That distinction matters more than most teams realize. Azure Was Already Complex Before Terraform, Azure already had: dozens of resource types implicit dependencies hidden defaults behaviors that only showed up at scale The Azure portal made it feel manageable. It did not make it explainable. When something broke, the answer was often: “Someone changed something at some point.” ...