Question

A cloud engineer maintains separate infrastructure-as-code templates for the dev, staging, and production environments. The environments are nearly identical, differing only in instance sizes, subnet CIDR ranges, and resource counts. Recent drift and copy-paste errors have caused a production outage when a fix applied to one template was forgotten in another. Which approach best prevents this class of problem while keeping deployments consistent across all three environments?

Accepted Answer

Consolidate into a single parameterized template and supply environment-specific values through separate variable/parameter files per environment

Answer

Keep the three templates but add a nightly script that copies the production template over the dev and staging templates

Answer

Manually provision the production environment through the cloud console to avoid template errors and retain IaC only for dev and staging

Answer

Merge all three environments into one shared set of resources to eliminate duplication entirely