Using the backend state

Note

The code for this section is under chap02/backend in the GitHub repo of this book.

By default, the Terraform state is stored locally in the current directory in a file called terraform.tfstate. This is fine as long as you are the only one working on the Terraform code and you are always working on the same machine. However, most of the time, you are part of a team that works jointly on the cloud infrastructure. If everybody stored their own version of the state file, chaos would ensue.

To enable collaboration, Terraform allows remote storage of the state file using the concept of state backends. (Please note that this is different from remote states, which we discuss in Chapter 5, Managing Environments with Terraform.) For Google Cloud, the remote backend is stored in Google Cloud Storage. Thus, instead of the state file being stored locally, the state file is stored in a Cloud Storage bucket where all team members (with the right permission) can...