Advanced Terraform State Management

Calendar February 22, 2026
Infrastructure
Intermediate
Terraform-State-Management, Infrastructure-as-Code, State-Migration
Terraform, State, Backends, Import, Refactoring
Terraform, Aws-S3, Aws-Dynamodb, Azure-Blob, Gcs

Remote Backends#

Every team beyond a single developer needs remote state. The three major backends:

S3 + DynamoDB (AWS):

terraform {
  backend "s3" {
    bucket         = "myorg-tfstate"
    key            = "prod/network/terraform.tfstate"
    region         = "us-east-1"
    dynamodb_table = "terraform-locks"
    encrypt        = true
  }
}

Azure Blob Storage:

terraform {
  backend "azurerm" {
    resource_group_name  = "tfstate-rg"
    storage_account_name = "myorgtfstate"
    container_name       = "tfstate"
    key                  = "prod/network/terraform.tfstate"
  }
}

Google Cloud Storage:

terraform {
  backend "gcs" {
    bucket = "myorg-tfstate"
    prefix = "prod/network"
  }
}

All three support locking natively (DynamoDB for S3, blob leases for Azure, object locking for GCS). Always enable encryption at rest and restrict access with IAM.