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.

Helm Release Naming Gotchas#

Helm charts derive Kubernetes resource names from the release name, but every chart does it differently. If you assume a consistent pattern, you will get bitten by DNS resolution failures, broken connection strings, and mysterious “service not found” errors.

Bitnami PostgreSQL: Names Are Not What You Expect#

The Bitnami PostgreSQL chart names resources using the release name directly, not {release-name}-postgresql. This catches nearly everyone.

# You deploy like this:
helm upgrade --install dt-postgresql bitnami/postgresql \
  --namespace dream-team \
  --set auth.database=mattermost \
  --set auth.username=mmuser

# You expect these resource names:
#   Pod:     dt-postgresql-postgresql-0   <-- WRONG
#   Service: dt-postgresql-postgresql     <-- WRONG

# Actual names:
#   Pod:     dt-postgresql-0
#   Service: dt-postgresql

This means your application connection string should reference dt-postgresql, not dt-postgresql-postgresql. If you chose release name postgresql, your service is just postgresql – which might collide with other things in your namespace.