Managing Environments

The development of every piece of software requires multiple environments. Generally, we use at least three environments – one for development, one for testing, and one for production. However, larger, more complex projects might require additional environments such as training and staging. Supporting multiple environments in a traditional on-premises setting can be costly to create and maintain. The beauty of the cloud is that we have virtually unlimited resources at our disposal. With efficient IaC, we can deploy environments quickly and remove them when they are no longer needed. As we only pay for what we use, we can have as many environments as needed but only pay for them when we actually use them. In this chapter, we will see how to manage multiple environments in Terraform.

This chapter describes the two main methods of managing multiple environments in Terraform – workspaces and directory structure. In particular, we will cover the following...