Question

Your team uses the ciscodevnet/iosxe Terraform provider to provision VLANs and then attach those VLANs to access interfaces. The interface resource references the VLAN ID through an interpolated attribute like iosxe_vlan.data_vlan.vlan_id. During 'terraform apply', you must guarantee the VLAN is created on the switch before the interface configuration that uses it is pushed, without adding any manual ordering. What is the correct way to ensure this ordering in Terraform?

Accepted Answer

Rely on the implicit dependency Terraform builds from the interpolated reference between the interface resource and the VLAN resource in its dependency graph.

Answer

Add a 'provisioner "local-exec"' block with a sleep command to the interface resource so the VLAN has time to be created.

Answer

Set 'parallelism = 1' in the provider block so resources are always created in file order top to bottom.

Answer

Place the VLAN resource physically above the interface resource in the .tf file so HCL processes it first.