Question

Your team uses an S3 backend without any locking mechanism configured. Two engineers run 'terraform apply' against the same state at nearly the same time. What is the primary risk this situation creates, and what feature is designed to prevent it?

Accepted Answer

The state file could become corrupted or lose track of resources because both writes are uncoordinated; state locking prevents concurrent operations from writing simultaneously.

Answer

Terraform will automatically merge both applies into a single consistent state, so no feature is needed to prevent problems.

Answer

The provider plugins may download twice; the .terraform.lock.hcl dependency lock file prevents this concurrent download issue.

Answer

The second apply will be rejected by the AWS API due to rate limiting; enabling exponential backoff resolves the concurrency concern.