Title: Discussion 13 — Preventing State Drift on a Team
Course: AIINFRA 101: Applied Infrastructure & Containerization > Section: Week 13 — Infrastructure as Code with Terraform

💬 Discussion 13 — Preventing State Drift on a Team (20 pts)

Prompt: Imagine a team member manually resized an EC2 instance in the AWS console to handle a sudden traffic spike, but never updated the Terraform code to reflect the new instance type. What happens the next time someone on the team runs terraform plan or terraform apply? Walk through what Terraform's state file "believes" versus what's actually running, and explain concretely how you would prevent this kind of drift going forward. In your answer, address:

- What specific failure mode (drift, lost state, merge conflicts, locking delays) worries you most for a small team, and why?
- Does a remote backend (S3+DynamoDB, GCS, Terraform Cloud) fully solve the coordination problem, or does it just make the failure modes less likely?
- Would splitting state by environment/component change your answer, and if so, how — and where should the "correct" instance configuration actually live?

Post your initial response, then respond to at least two classmates — ideally ones who reached a different conclusion than you — and engage directly with their reasoning rather than restating your own post.