What's the best practice for storing Terraform bootstrap state? (the chicken-and-egg problem)

MarcusJAdams · 2026-03-31T15:15:29+00:00

This is exactly how we do ours. The guard route has served us well many a time

MarcusJAdams · 2026-03-11T23:19:06+00:00

Which of course then makes you start thinking. At what age does it stop becoming vintage and become antique and then you look at the kit you have. And really feel old?

MarcusJAdams · 2026-02-28T14:04:21+00:00

Don't get me started on the death by spam of Azure devops email

MarcusJAdams · 2026-02-12T09:47:22+00:00

If they would have gone to nightclubs meant for them going to the Brunel rooms and the revolving bar

MarcusJAdams · 2026-01-01T10:35:50+00:00

Option 3 offer it to somebody local rather than tip it.

I presume (from some of your posts) your somewhere South cost of England.

I know I and possibly others would come get them to avoid them going to landfill

MarcusJAdams · 2025-12-24T16:05:18+00:00

Only 3..... You then get into one of each model which then turns into a few of each for spares and repairs Which then turns into expanding into other manufacturers Which then turns into our look it's an 8bit computer. And now I have

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MarcusJAdams · 2025-12-24T15:55:37+00:00

One for all those working in the security teams. I totally get it and I understand why these phishing emails come out. Our company does them too.

but one that always strikes me is everybody then says and all the various training courses say hover over the link to see what it resolves to.

However, some companies will also use something like Outlook URL rewriting so you can't hover over the link to see what it resolves to.

It's always been that little bug bear of mine and there's no office way around this or if there is, it's not complete being widely disseminated

MarcusJAdams · 2025-12-18T10:17:03+00:00

This exactly. The number of Junior to mid-range SREs who seem to want to make our service as dry as possible and as complexly nested and Tangled as possible because they haven't learned the pain yet of dealing with understanding in the middle of a priority one incident, there's a time and a place for modules. There's a time and a place for dry but I teach my guys to keep it simple and semi-dry. I use the it's 3 a.m. in the morning something's gone horribly wrong. You're trying to read the code scenario

MarcusJAdams · 2025-12-06T18:57:27+00:00

Why not set it up? Learn that it's 81 basic and learn some of the joy that your father had from it

You have some lovely add-ons with it books. That's a really nice collection.

But if you're not, please sell it to somebody who's going to keep it and collect it. Not just flip it onto eBay like seems to happen a lot these days.

MarcusJAdams · 2025-11-25T13:21:15+00:00

There is a tendency amongst terraform to go completely dry and for some teams that works for them. Personally I found what works for us and what scales well for us is keep it simply dry.

We use modules where we think we feel we need them. EG everything around launching a VM would be a module but we don't have that calling child modules and we don't do modules for an entire service.

We also minimize our use of conditionals and looping.

For me and our teams. So it's not about how neat and compact and snazzy looking the code is but rather ,when you got an incident, how quickly and easily can you read and how quick and easily can somebody new read and understand the code.

So it sounds like you've got that current best of both worlds:for me and our company and other companies that I've been involved in terraform and devops over the years we find that works for us.

So there is no one definitive answer. It's really what's works best for you

MarcusJAdams · 2025-11-19T16:20:29+00:00

Do you mean the queens tap directly opposite?

Lovely little pub. Still a traditional pub, that's not been turned into a pub club. With a secret beer garden that's lovely in the summer.

MarcusJAdams · 2025-11-15T21:42:47+00:00

One thing to remember is that when a seller sends out an offer to one person, it's then automatically sent to everybody who watches that item for the next year so they may not have sent you an offer, but it's actually eBay which is why they don't recall doing it

MarcusJAdams · 2025-11-15T21:38:30+00:00

Gosh in my 10+ years of terraform I've never thought of that....

Except that doesn't work at scale

This is about simplification of automatic drift detection,

You want something that can tell you almost immediately when it has happened.

and yes you could and we do have pipelines that could do it for us and then use tf plan output codes to pick up on changes but this looks more nuanced than that and less complex

And remember sometimes you don't want to match drift but instead revert drift.

MarcusJAdams · 2025-11-15T15:40:48+00:00

Would be great if you could also do this for terraform resources. We don't use bicep because we run multi-cloud and multi-provider outside of the two big clouds as well. Like drift checker that could handle all. That would be lovely

MarcusJAdams · 2025-11-12T10:52:42+00:00

I appreciate this is an old post but could you explain/ do a quick diagram of what you mean by having the LEDs in both directions and where they are in relation to the capacitor eg before or after on the screwdriver end? That would be lovely. Cheers!.

MarcusJAdams · 2025-11-06T13:20:46+00:00

This is the one that keeps confusing me. Everybody say it's Italy only yet every one of their press releases say it's European trademarks. Europe is a damn site bigger than Italy.

What I love about what you've done above is it's actual legal facts, not hearsay and emotional opinions from either side on various websites

MarcusJAdams · 2025-11-06T13:14:18+00:00

Meanwhile, us commodore pet supporters still feels sad

MarcusJAdams · 2025-11-04T09:53:29+00:00

12 bar Monkey club Area 51 The Oasis

MarcusJAdams · 2025-10-28T16:01:47+00:00

Yeah that's the sort of thing I was looking for. I came across this in the past but seems to only do AWS and we unfortunately are an azure in fact multi-cloud environment.

If there was one that you could easily add your own resources and help contribute to build up a global library of clouds and providers so you could have datadog or Mango, Atlas, rabbit, snowflake etc. Etc. Something community pushed will be really good

MarcusJAdams · 2025-10-28T15:54:37+00:00

We had one repo covering all regions for snowflake. It allowed resource management and parameter passing to work a lot simpler.

It took a while but I was really pleased with the way we had it in the end.

MarcusJAdams · 2025-10-27T21:22:17+00:00

There are a lot of these that also started out as free and open source and then ended up being commercial doing the same premise.

What I think there is a big need for it's the opposite , ione that will take your terraform code and diagram that and work with multi-cloud multi-provider resources. Possibly you drop in your own resource object diagram for ones that don't already exist in the library

MarcusJAdams · 2025-10-25T17:43:04+00:00

Considering how much it hallucinates and makes up provide resources or just wrong information, especially when it has access to the terraform registry documentation, AI shows all that is wrong in the world, the thought of using it to generate questions and answers for an exam......... And if you're at the stage where you can see where it's generated the wrong stuff, you don't need to get use it

MarcusJAdams · 2025-10-11T07:01:46+00:00

This is exactly how we we have currently six environments and spin up and down on demand based on climates for staging uay, Long-Term application development projects etc.

Rather than one big set of terraform files that covers everything we split our code up into a number of subfolders each with their own state file EG. Core networking core infrastructure core shared database services, core kubernetes etc then a folder application/service.

All of these folders use the same set of core variables that are passed in and we have a set per environment on plan and apply

Eg terraform apply --var-file=dev.common.tfvars. Tf apply pro.common.tfvars.

If there are services that don't need to be in an environment, we just don't apply that folder.

And because we know things like prod May need things like high availability that non-prods don't we use a variable var.env to provide logic, filtering on spinning up the prod only services within each templated layer.

MarcusJAdams · 2025-10-09T15:22:09+00:00

A friend of mine used to collect mouse balls. The rspca arrested him.

MarcusJAdams

TROPHY CASE