Diagnosing Common Terraform Problems

Calendar February 22, 2026
Infrastructure
Intermediate
Terraform-Debugging, Infrastructure-as-Code, State-Recovery
Terraform, Debugging, State, Lifecycle, Troubleshooting
Terraform

Stuck State Lock#

A CI job was cancelled, a laptop lost network, or a process crashed mid-apply. Terraform refuses to run:

Error acquiring the state lock
Lock Info:
  ID:        f8e7d6c5-b4a3-2109-8765-43210fedcba9
  Operation: OperationTypeApply
  Who:       deploy@ci-runner
  Created:   2026-02-20 09:15:22 +0000 UTC

Verify the lock holder is truly dead. Check CI job status, then:

terraform force-unlock f8e7d6c5-b4a3-2109-8765-43210fedcba9

If the lock was from a crashed apply, the state may be partially updated. Run terraform plan immediately after unlocking to see the current situation.

Terraform Code Quality: Patterns, Anti-Patterns, and Review Heuristics

Calendar February 22, 2026
Infrastructure
Intermediate
Terraform-Code-Review, Anti-Pattern-Detection, Code-Quality-Assessment, Naming-Conventions
Terraform, Code-Quality, Anti-Patterns, Best-Practices, Review, Naming, Tagging, Lifecycle, Modules, Variables, Heuristics
Terraform, Tflint, Checkov

Terraform Code Quality#

Writing Terraform that works is easy. Writing Terraform that is safe, maintainable, and comprehensible to the next person (or agent) is harder. Most quality problems are not bugs — they are patterns that work today but create pain tomorrow: hardcoded IDs that break in a new account, missing lifecycle rules that cause accidental data loss, modules that are too big to understand or too small to justify their existence.