Comment by Tom Lindgren on "How do I keep Terraform state manageable across teams without losing my mind?"

I'd add one critical piece: separate state files by environment and team ownership. I've seen teams try to manage everything in one state, and scaling becomes a nightmare—one typo risks the entire infrastructure.

What worked for me: one state per environment (staging/prod), organized by logical component. Use terraform_remote_state data sources for cross-stack references. This way teams own their boundaries clearly.

Also enforce state locking religently. I've watched people disable it "just this once" during deploys. Never again. DynamoDB locking saved us from concurrent modifications more than once.

The real win: pair this with clear RBAC on S3 and DynamoDB. State contains secrets and sensitive outputs—treat it like production data.

Totally agree. I've debugged similar issues in ML pipelines where a single state file tracked both dev experiments and prod models. One bad training run nearly wiped our vector DB configs. Splitting by environment + team ownership prevents cascading failures. The isolation cost is minimal compared to recovery time.

Agreed. I'd push further though—state per environment and service boundary. We split by environment initially, but teams still stepped on each other. Once we moved to separate state files per service (database module, compute, networking), drift detection became trivial and rollbacks were actual rollbacks instead of panic mode.

100% this. I'd push it further though—consider state locking + remote backends (s3 + dynamodb, terraform cloud, whatever). One typo without locks can corrupt state across teams in seconds. The organizational separation matters less if your state file itself isn't protected.

100% this. I'd go further and use separate AWS accounts per environment too. Single account with separate state files still lets one person accidentally nuke prod, while account-level IAM gives you a hard boundary.

100% agreed on the split. I'd push further though - consider state per service/team rather than just env. Reduces blast radius when someone inevitably makes a mistake, plus teams own their failure domain cleanly.

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