How to manage Terraform state

This is Part 3 of the <a href="https://blog.gruntwork.io/a-comprehensive-guide-to-terraform-b3d32832baca#.b6sun4nkn" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Comprehensive Guide to Terraform</a> series. In Part 1, you learned <a href="https://blog.gruntwork.io/why-we-use-terraform-and-not-chef-puppet-ansible-saltstack-or-cloudformation-7989dad2865c#.63ls7fpkq" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">why we picked Terraform as our IAC tool of choice and not Chef, Puppet, Ansible, Pulumi, or CloudFormation</a>. In Part 2, you got started with the <a href="https://blog.gruntwork.io/an-introduction-to-terraform-f17df9c6d180" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">basic syntax and features of Terraform and used them to deploy a cluster of web servers on AWS</a>. In this post, you’ll learn about how Terraform manages state and the impact that has on file layout, isolation, and locking in a Terraform project. Here are the topics we’ll cover: <ol> <li><a href="https://blog.gruntwork.io/how-to-manage-terraform-state-28f5697e68fa#0054" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">What is Terraform state?</a></li> <li><a href="https://blog.gruntwork.io/how-to-manage-terraform-state-28f5697e68fa#aeb7" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">Shared storage for state files</a></li> <li><a href="https://blog.gruntwork.io/how-to-manage-terraform-state-28f5697e68fa#01db" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">Limitations with Terraform’s Backends</a></li> <li><a href="https://blog.gruntwork.io/how-to-manage-terraform-state-28f5697e68fa#784f" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">Isolating state files</a></li> <li><a href="https://blog.gruntwork.io/how-to-manage-terraform-state-28f5697e68fa#7077" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">The terraform_remote_state data source</a></li> </ol> You can find working sample code for the examples in this blog post in the <a href="https://github.com/brikis98/terraform-up-and-running-code" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Terraform: Up & Running code samples repo</a>. This blog post corresponds to Chapter 3 of Terraform Up & Running, “How to Manage Terraform State,” so look for the code samples in the <code>03-terraform-state</code> folders. <a href="https://blog.gruntwork.io/how-to-manage-terraform-state-28f5697e68fa">Learn More</a>