Terraform Best Practices for Azure & AWS

Infrastructure as Code only pays off if it's maintainable. A tangled mess of Terraform is a different kind of debt — one that blocks every deploy and scares off new contributors.

First, treat state as a shared, protected resource. Remote state with locking is non-negotiable — on AWS use S3 + DynamoDB, on Azure use a storage account blob with leases. No local state, no drift.

Design modules around reusable, versioned units — not one module per resource. A good module hides provider complexity behind a small, well-documented interface that works the same on AWS and Azure.

Pin provider and module versions. Reproducibility beats novelty. Your infrastructure should build the same way in a year as it does today.

Run plan in CI on every PR. Human review is for architecture; machines should catch the formatting and diff errors. Approval gates on apply, automation on plan.