Storing state files remotely

As you know, by default, Terraform will store the state file on your local disk and you have to figure out yourself how to distribute it within your team. One option you learned is to store it in the git repository: you get the workflow, you get the versioning and you even get some level of security on top. But there is also a concept of remote state provided by Terraform.

The idea is that, before you start applying your templates, you configure a remote storage. After that, your state file will be pulled and pushed from a remote facility. There are 11 backends for your state provided by Terraform: Consul, S3, etcd, Atlas, and others. You will learn how to use Simple Storage Service (S3) for this purpose.

Note

Atlas is a commercial offering from HashiCorp. One part of it is named Terraform Enterprise: it combines secure remote state storage, versioning of state file changes, logs of Terraform runs, and some other features. It is well integrated with GitHub. You...