Question

Your platform team manages Google Cloud infrastructure using Terraform across dozens of projects. Multiple engineers run applies from their laptops and a Cloud Build pipeline, and you have started seeing state corruption and conflicting changes. You need a solution that ensures state consistency, prevents concurrent applies from clobbering each other, and centralizes execution. What should you do?

Accepted Answer

Configure a remote backend in a Cloud Storage bucket (which provides state locking) and require all plan/apply operations to run through the Cloud Build CI/CD pipeline.

Answer

Store the Terraform state in a Cloud Storage bucket with versioning and object-level locking, and continue letting engineers run applies from their laptops.

Answer

Have each engineer keep local state files and periodically commit them to a shared Git repository to track changes.

Answer

Store the state in a Cloud Storage bucket per engineer and merge the state files manually before each release.