How Enterprise Teams Manage Infrastructure at Scale with Terraform
Large-scale Terraform usage introduces challenges that solo tutorials never cover. This deep-dive explains how enterprise teams handle state corruption (concurrent applies, interrupted pipelines, wrong-environment commands, dual ownership), why state files are treated like production databases containing plaintext secrets, and how repositories and state files are structured around team ownership boundaries. It covers module versioning with semantic versioning to prevent company-wide pipeline breakages, sharing infrastructure data between state files via remote state vs. cloud data sources, the full PR-to-production pipeline workflow including CODEOWNERS enforcement, scheduled drift detection, and a step-by-step state recovery playbook including backups, S3 versioning restores, force-unlock, and re-import.