Question

Your team maintains Terraform configurations that provision resources across AWS. During a recent CI run, a teammate's apply produced a slightly different plan than yours, even though the configuration and state were identical. You discover that each machine downloaded a different version of the AWS provider from the Terraform Registry. Which practice would most directly prevent this inconsistency?

Accepted Answer

Pin the provider to a specific version using a version constraint in the required_providers block, and commit the resulting lock file to version control.

Answer

Store the Terraform state in a remote backend so both machines share the same state file.

Answer

Add explicit depends_on arguments to each resource so the providers evaluate resources in the same order.

Answer

Run terraform refresh before each apply so every machine synchronizes the latest attributes from AWS.