terraform
Reading order: HashiCorp infrastructure tooling
- What Terraform/OpenTofu actually is, and how it works
- What Packer actually is, and how it works in packer
- What Terraform/OpenTofu, Nomad, and Packer are, and how they relate
- Terraform state locking just dropped its DynamoDB requirement
Everything in this topic, oldest first
What Terraform/OpenTofu actually is, and how it works - 2026-09-17
Starting a second from-scratch series, this time on HashiCorp's infrastructure tooling: Terraform/OpenTofu, Packer, and Nomad. First subject: what Terraform/OpenTofu actually does under the hood, since almost everything else about it follows from one thing — it only ever…
What Terraform/OpenTofu, Nomad, and Packer are, and how they relate - 2026-09-17
Third entry in the HashiCorp infrastructure series. Each tool so far has been introduced on its own; this one is the point of doing that — seeing where each one's job actually starts and stops, using Nomad (not yet covered) to complete the set.
Terraform state locking just dropped its DynamoDB requirement - 2026-09-23
Fourth entry in the HashiCorp series. The Terraform/OpenTofu fundamentals entry covered the state file as "Terraform's memory of what it created" and moved on; this one is the deep dive it deferred — locking, inspecting, refactoring, and reconciling that file, plus a genuinely…
What Terraform, OpenTofu, and Packer promise about secrets, and where each promise stops - 2026-09-29
The Ansible Vault entry on this site was framed around a boundary Ansible states outright: encryption there "ONLY protects data at rest." Terraform's equivalent — the sensitive argument — makes no such promise, and it's worth being precise about which of the three tools can…