Terraform Infrastructure as Code: Modular Architectures, Remote State Locking & Drift Defense

When infrastructure is built by clicking buttons inside the AWS or Google Cloud console, it is impossible to audit who changed what, disaster recovery takes days of manual guesswork, and replicating staging to match production is a nightmare.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) turns your entire cloud architecture into version-controlled code. Spin up a complete duplicate staging environment in minutes, review architectural changes via GitHub pull requests, and rollback mistakes effortlessly.

When two engineers run terraform apply simultaneously, state file race conditions can delete running production resources. DynamoDB mutex locking eliminates this danger entirely.

terraform {
  required_version = ">= 1.9.0"
  required_providers {
    aws = {
      source  = "hashicorp/aws"
      version = "~> 5.50"
    }
  }

  backend "s3" {
    bucket         = "natelad-terraform-state-prod"
    key            = "core-infra/terraform.tfstate"
    region         = "af-south-1"
    encrypt        = true
    dynamodb_table = "natelad-terraform-locks"
  }
}

module "vpc" {
  source             = "./modules/vpc"
  environment        = var.environment
  cidr_block         = "10.0.0.0/16"
  availability_zones = ["af-south-1a", "af-south-1b"]
}

Separate production AWS/GCP accounts completely from development and staging accounts. A rogue script or broken policy in staging should never have the IAM permissions to modify production assets.