Question

A platform team manages all Google Cloud infrastructure with Terraform. Multiple engineers run 'terraform apply' from their laptops against the same configuration, and the team has recently experienced corrupted state and conflicting resource changes when two people apply at the same time. As the cloud architect, what should you recommend to prevent concurrent modifications and enable safe collaboration?

Accepted Answer

Store the Terraform state file in a Cloud Storage bucket configured as the backend, which provides state storage with automatic state locking.

Answer

Have each engineer keep the state file locally and commit it to the Git repository after every apply so others can pull the latest version.

Answer

Instruct engineers to coordinate over chat and agree on a schedule so only one person runs 'terraform apply' at a time.

Answer

Split the configuration into separate copies per engineer, each managing its own state file for the same resources.