Individual Terraform configurations quickly become difficult to manage when you’re managing infrastructure across multiple environments, teams, and cloud providers.. You need an orchestration mechanism — a systematic approach to coordinating, sequencing, and managing your infrastructure deployments.
This isn’t just about running terraform apply commands in the right order; it is rather about building resilient and scalable infrastructure delivery pipelines that your entire engineering organization can trust.
Terraform orchestration transforms how platform teams approach infrastructure as code. Instead of trying to solve everything related to dependency management, state conflicts, and deployment coordination, you establish patterns that scale from startup to enterprise.
Let’s look into the techniques that separate operational excellence from infrastructure chaos.
What we’ll cover:
Terraform orchestration involves using Terraform to coordinate the provisioning and management of multiple infrastructure resources in a defined sequence to achieve a complete environment setup. It goes beyond creating individual resources, ensuring dependencies, order of execution, and integrations between components are handled automatically.
Think of it as the conductor directing an orchestra. Each musician (Terraform configuration) plays their part, but the conductor ensures they work together harmoniously.
Terraform orchestration allows you to define infrastructure as code, apply version control to that codebase, and track changes to your infrastructure while managing complex interdependencies between different infrastructure components.
Terraform orchestration addresses three fundamental challenges:
- Dependency management: Your database must exist before your application servers, and your networking layer needs to be established before anything else. Orchestration ensures these dependencies are respected across all deployments.
- State coordination: Multiple teams working on different infrastructure components need their Terraform states to remain consistent and conflict-free. Orchestration provides the mechanisms for safe, concurrent infrastructure changes.
- Deployment sequencing: Some changes require specific ordering, rolling updates, blue-green deployments, or multi-region failovers. Orchestration gives you precise control over when and how changes are applied.
However, other challenges should be considered before starting the actual orchestration, such as how to write the code, structure it, manage governance, and others.
Note: When dealing with infrastructure, Terraform orchestration is just one part of the puzzle. Building for success means orchestrating everything related to provisioning, configuring, and governing. Depending on what you use in your environment, real infrastructure orchestration happens at multiple levels: IaC, configuration management, containers, CI/CD, policy as code, and more.
Terraform is a declarative tool, which makes orchestration feel automatic. You describe your desired state, and Terraform builds the dependency graph to get there without you needing to do anything.
This works well because Terraform has:
- Built-in dependency management: Terraform understands which resources must be created or destroyed first.
- Modular structure: This encourages reusability.
- State tracking: It maintains a snapshot of the infrastructure across runs.
Orchestration also means coordinating the application of infrastructure plans across multiple stages, not just managing individual resources, and this requires structure.
Terraform orchestration is a multi-stage process that starts from how you write your code and flows through how you deploy it and what you do to ensure you have implemented the necessary guardrails to stay safe.
1. Structuring your repository
First, you should decide whether to structure your Terraform-related repositories as a monorepo or as polyrepos. The debate about this is heated, and each approach has advantages and disadvantages.
The monorepo structure keeps all your infrastructure code in a single repository. This approach works well when you have a centralized platform team managing infrastructure across the organization. You get atomic changes across multiple environments and simplified dependency management between different infrastructure components.
On the other hand, it can be difficult to navigate a monorepo that holds all your code, and new team members will have trouble understanding what is happening.
The polyrepo approach separates different infrastructure concerns into individual repositories. This is appropriate when different teams own different parts of your infrastructure and need independent deployment cycles. Each Terraform module will have its own repository, which can have its own CI/CD pipeline and access controls.
Choosing between monorepo and polyrepo depends entirely on your preference. Both approaches work, but they have their limitations.
2. Using modules
You should always use modules and make them reusable. Modules are the foundation of effective Terraform orchestration because they enable you to abstract complexity while maintaining consistency across environments.
Your modules should be composable and focused on a single responsibility. An EKS module should handle cluster creation, but it shouldn’t try to manage applications or implement monitoring, as those would be concerns for different modules.
Ensure your modules produce outputs for other modules to use as inputs. This creates a clear dependency chain that Terraform can follow during orchestration.
Learn more about how to structure your Terraform modules and what the best practices are.
3. Remote state
Configure remote state storage with proper locking and versioning to enable team collaboration and prevent state corruption.
You should always try to keep your state files as small as possible, and use the Terraform remote state datasource to create loose coupling between your infrastructure components. This way, your networking team, for example, can evolve its infrastructure independently as long as it maintains stable output interfaces.
The Terraform remote state datasource can become cumbersome to use, especially when used at scale, but there is a better way to implement this exact same mechanism that works out of the box with Spacelift through its stack dependencies.
Check out this video to learn more about how this works:
4. Implement variables and use validations
Structure your variables to support orchestration across multiple environments while maintaining security and type safety.
Use variable validation to catch configuration errors early in your orchestration process. This prevents deployments with invalid configurations from reaching your infrastructure.
Example variable with validation:
variable "environment" {
description = "Environment name (dev, staging, prod)"
type = string
validation {
condition = contains(["dev", "staging", "prod"], var.environment)
error_message = "Environment must be dev, staging, or prod."
}
}If you want to learn more about how to use Terraform variables and tfvars files, check out this video:
5. Manage dependencies
Terraform automatically infers resource dependencies based on how outputs from one resource are referenced in another. This implicit dependency tracking ensures that resources are created, updated, or destroyed in the correct order without requiring manual intervention. However, not all dependencies are visible through resource references. In such cases, use the depends_on argument to explicitly define the relationship.
For example, if a resource relies on the successful completion of a provisioner or a manually triggered action that Terraform does not automatically recognize, depends_on ensures the correct sequencing. This prevents race conditions or inconsistent infrastructure states during apply operations.
6. Leverage Terraform’s built-in features
Use Terraform’s advanced features to create more flexible and maintainable orchestration configurations.
Terraform for_each and count let you create multiple resources of the same type without repeating your code:
# for_each example
variable "vpcs" {
type = map(object({
cidr_block = string
env = string
}))
default = {
vpc1dev = {
cidr_block = "10.0.0.0/16"
env = "dev"
}
vpc1stage = {
cidr_block = "10.1.0.0/16"
env = "staging"
}
vpc1prod = {
cidr_block = "10.2.0.0/16"
env = "prod"
}
}
}
resource "aws_vpc" "main" {
for_each = var.vpcs
cidr_block = each.value.cidr_block
enable_dns_hostnames = true
tags = {
Name = each.key
Environment = each.value.env
}
}# count example
resource "aws_instance" "this" {
count = 5
instance_type = "t2.micro"
ami = "ami-3sd98s3"
}Dynamic blocks let you repeat a block inside your configuration multiple times, without hardcoding it at the resource level. Ternary operators let you conditionally create resources or expressions inside your resources’ parameters.
resource "aws_security_group" "app" {
name_prefix = "${var.environment}-app-"
vpc_id = var.vpc_id
# Dynamic ingress rules based on environment
dynamic "ingress" {
for_each = var.environment == "prod" ? var.production_ingress_rules : var.development_ingress_rules
content {
from_port = ingress.value.from_port
to_port = ingress.value.to_port
protocol = ingress.value.protocol
cidr_blocks = ingress.value.cidr_blocks
description = ingress.value.description
}
}
}The above example will populate a security group resource with ingress rules but will check if the environment variable is set to prod, and if it is, it will use the production_ingress_rules, otherwise, the development_ingress_rules.
To learn more about these two concepts, check out these articles:
Terraform functions are built-in, reusable code blocks that perform specific tasks within Terraform configurations. They make your code more dynamic and ensure your configuration is DRY.
7. Use Terraform format and validate before pushing your code, and embed them in your deployment methodology
Orchestration also means consistency and correctness. Add terraform fmt and terraform validate as pre-commit hooks or CI jobs.
This helps with:
- Catching syntax errors early
- Enforce formatting standards
- Improve collaboration in teams
Infrastructure code is still code, so it should be treated like software engineering.
8. Use security vulnerability scanners
Security vulnerability scanners make it easy to detect vulnerabilities inside your code before it reaches the production environment. IaC allows you to create resources that aren’t secure and easy to attack.
Tfsec, Trivy, Checkov, or Kics are powerful security vulnerability scanners that help you catch common misconfigurations.
With these tools, you’ll get feedback on dangerous settings like public ingress rules, hardcoded credentials, or excessive IAM privileges, all before terraform apply even runs.
9. Use policy as code
Policy as code should be implemented to enforce organizational standards and compliance requirements. With policy as code, you should be able to control what kind of resources engineers can create and what kind of parameters they have, enforce tagging, control how many approvals you need for your Terraform runs, and more.
Open Policy Agent (OPA) is the standard for policy as code, and the language it uses is called Rego. These policy checks should be embedded in your deployment options.
10. CI/CDs vs specialized infrastructure orchestration platforms
Whether you choose a traditional CI/CD platform or a specialized infrastructure orchestration platform will depend on your organization’s maturity. If you are just starting out with IaC, you might get away with using CI/CD pipelines for IaC deployments, but infrastructure orchestration platforms are non-negotiable for IaC at scale.
Generic CI/CDs lack some of the fundamental requirements for IaC management:
- State management
- Built-in policy as code engine
- Drift detection and remediation
- Observability
- Auditability
- Building dependencies between your workflows
In addition, generic CI/CDs are difficult to maintain and take a lot of time to build.
An infrastructure orchestration platform such as Spacelift solves all of the above problems and more. If you want to learn more about what Spacelift can do for your Terraform code and your infrastructure orchestration, check out this article.
The simple answer is “no.” You can’t use Terraform alone to orchestrate your infrastructure because it is just one piece of the puzzle.
In addition to Terraform, you need:
- Configuration management tools: If your workloads use virtual machines, you need to somehow configure them. While Terraform can help you do this with its built-in provisioners, these are not reliable, and as the Terraform documentation states, you should always use them as a last resort if nothing else is possible. A tool like Ansible can help with configuration, making the process straightforward.
- Container orchestration: If your workloads are heavy on containers, you need a tool such as Kubernetes to help you orchestrate them. You can still provision the Kubernetes clusters with Terraform, but different resources should be deployed using kubectl, helm, or kustomize. However, running these tools will still require a CI/CD pipeline or an orchestration platform
- Policy as code: You need to ensure that your infrastructure is secure at every step. While you can check everything manually, this doesn’t really scale. Leveraging a policy-as-code engine, such as the Open Policy Agent (OPA), will enable your organization to build the governance mechanism it needs without too much hassle.
- Security vulnerability scanners: Security is often overlooked, but it should be one of the first things you implement if you are planning to succeed. Shifting left with security vulnerability scanners such as Trivy or Checkov, can detect issues in your codebase, before pushing your code to the main branch
- CI/CD: You need some sort of mechanism to deploy all of your resources. While CI/CDs are great for application deployment and building container images, they lack certain features you need when it comes to infrastructure, such as state management, built-in drift detection, observability, the ability to tie workflows together, and more.
- Infrastructure orchestration platforms: Supercharge your infrastructure workflows with a specialized tool that understands your infrastructure, implements policy as code, allows self-service, integrates with any third-party tool you want, and enables you to create dependencies between your workflows and share outputs.
Spacelift can help with everything mentioned above. It also supports OpenTofu, Pulumi, CloudFormation, Ansible, and Kubernetes, making it easy to implement all the workflows you need for your infrastructure, while giving you all the security mechanisms you require.
Terraform orchestration is not just about wiring together modules and preparing the order of your configurations; it’s about building a reliable delivery system for your infrastructure. It is a multi-step process, and it is just one piece of the entire infrastructure puzzle.
Focus on automation, reuse, and guardrails because that is how you go from writing Terraform to orchestrating it. This ensures that you move fast while keeping everything in control.
If you are looking for a specialized platform that helps you organize everything related to Terraform orchestration, check out Spacelift. You can set up a personalized demo with one of our engineers.
Achieve Terraform at scale with Spacelift
Spacelift takes managing infrastructure at scale to a whole new level, offering a more open, more customizable, and more extensible product. It’s a better, more flexible CI/CD for Terraform, offering maximum security without sacrificing functionality.
