Managing Multiple Environments

Sometimes you need to deploy not only to production, but to staging or development. How do you handle this?

Two Main Approaches to Multiple Environments

1. Workspaces
   • Multiple named sections within a single backend.
   • terraform workspace new dev
2. File Structure
   • Directory layout provides separation, modules provide reuse

   _modules
       main.tf
       variables.tf
   dev
       main.tf
   production
       main.tf

• Further separation (at logical component groups, such as compute, networking etc..) is useful for larger projects.
  • Isolate things that change frequently from those which don’t.
• Referencing resources across configurations is possible using terraform_remote_state.