Terraform for Production Sysadmins

Part I

Infrastructure as Code Foundations

Why IaC exists; declarative vs imperative provisioning; Terraform in the platform ecosystem; reproducibility, drift, and ownership.

6 lessons

Part II

Terraform Architecture

The CLI, Core, configuration, state, providers, plugins, and the dependency graph; what each component does and does not do.

6 lessons

Part III

Installing and Versioning Terraform

Official installation, version pinning, the dependency lockfile, and reproducible control environments.

6 lessons

Part IV

HCL: The Terraform Configuration Language

Blocks, arguments, expressions, types, conditionals, for expressions, functions, and readability of production HCL.

7 lessons

Part V

The Terraform Workflow

fmt, validate, init, plan, apply, destroy, output, console, show, and what each proves (and does not prove).

7 lessons

Part VI

Providers and the Provider Ecosystem

Provider plugin model, sources, versions, aliases, authentication, failures, and the supply chain.

6 lessons

Part VII

Resources, Data Sources, and count/for_each

Managed resources, CRUD lifecycle, attributes, computed values, replacement, data sources, and resource identity for multiple instances.

7 lessons

Part VIII

Dependencies and the Resource Graph

Implicit dependencies, explicit depends_on, the dependency graph, parallelism, and ordering.

6 lessons

Part IX

State: The Core Production Concept

Why state exists, what it contains, how it maps resource addresses to real infrastructure, and why it is the trust boundary.

6 lessons

Part X

State Operations: Read, Move, Remove, Import

Local state, remote state, state list/show/pull, state mv, state rm, import, moved blocks, and the production risks of each.

6 lessons

Part XI

State Security and Lifecycle

Sensitive data in state, encryption-at-rest, lifecycle.prevent_destroy, lifecycle.replace_triggered_by, and lifecycle.precondition.

6 lessons

Part XII

State Recovery and Backup

State versioning, backups, recovery procedures, and the production control for state loss.

6 lessons

Part XIII

Variables, Outputs, and Locals

Variable types, validation, sensitive values, precedence, outputs, locals, and how to design a clean interface.

6 lessons

Part XIV

Modules: Reusable Building Blocks

Module structure, interfaces, sources, versioning, and the production rules of module design.

7 lessons

Part XV

Environment Architecture and State Boundaries

How to design multi-environment estates; state boundaries as the unit of failure; workspaces, directories, and accounts.

7 lessons

Part XVI

Plan Review and Saved Plans

How to read a plan, what the symbols mean, saved plans, and the production review workflow.

6 lessons

Part XVII

Drift Detection and Reconciliation

How drift appears, how to detect it continuously, and the production rules for reconciling it.

6 lessons

Part XVIII

Troubleshooting and Recovery

State corruption, plan failures, provider failures, partial apply, and the production control for each.

6 lessons

Part XIX

Security: Credentials, Secrets, and Audit

Production credential patterns, secrets management, IAM, least privilege, and audit.

6 lessons

Part XX

Supply Chain: Providers and Modules

Provider provenance, dependency lock file, module sources, version pinning, and supply-chain risk.

6 lessons

Part XXI

Testing, Linting, and Static Analysis

terraform test, fmt, validate, lint, security scanning, and the layered validation model.

6 lessons

Part XXII

CI/CD for Production Terraform

Production pipeline design, plan artifacts, gated deploys, CI/CD credentials, and observability.

6 lessons

Part XXIII

Policy as Code

Production guardrails: OPA, Sentinel, Conftest, and policy enforcement patterns.

6 lessons

Part XXIV

Upgrading Terraform, Providers, and Modules

Terraform Core upgrades, provider upgrades, module upgrades, and the production control for each.

6 lessons

Part XXV

Migrations and Backend Changes

Backend migration, state migration, and importing existing infrastructure.

6 lessons

Part XXVI

Cloud and Platform Operations

Provider-neutral patterns for cloud, on-prem, and multi-cloud; Terraform + Ansible + Proxmox integration.

6 lessons

Part XXVII

Enterprise Scale: Multi-Team, Multi-Account

Multi-team, multi-account, multi-region; repositories, modules, and ownership at scale.

6 lessons

Part XXVIII

Disaster Recovery and Resilience

Backup, RPO/RTO, state DR, and the production control for asset recovery.

6 lessons

Part XXIX

Incident Response: The 3 AM Test

Troubleshooting during incidents, break-glass changes, and the production control for partial failures.

6 lessons

Part Labs

Hands-On Labs

Lab exercises across the course.

0 lessons

Part Runbooks

Operational Runbooks

Runbooks for production operations.

0 lessons

Part Checklists

Production Checklists

Checklists for production readiness.

0 lessons

Part Breakfix

Break/Fix Scenarios

Diagnostic and recovery exercises.

0 lessons

Part XXX

Capstone: A Production Terraform Estate

A multi-stage capstone that exercises every concept in the course, with failure injection and recovery.

0 lessons

Part XXXI

Final Assessment

The final practical assessment: diagnose a deliberately flawed production Terraform estate, rank the findings by blast radius, and state the remediation and its validation for each.

0 lessons