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Week 9 · Field delivery

Plan before apply

0:00 / 3:00

15 seconds

Apply without a plan.

A habit. The VPC module replaced itself. The cluster lost DNS for twenty minutes.

terraform planDiffReviewHumanapplyProd
Lesson notesPlan before apply: the short version+

Week 9 · Kubernetes & Terraform · about 3 minutes

What you will be able to do

Read the Terraform plan diff before it touches Helix production.

The idea

Always run plan (or the CI equivalent) and read the diff. Apply is a deliberate act after review.

Surprises belong in plan output, not in production.

terraform plan -out=tf.plan
# review
terraform apply tf.plan

If you did not read the plan, you did not approve the change.

Key takeaways

  • CI shows the diff.
  • Humans review destroy/replace.
  • No surprise applies.

Part of the Forward Deployed Engineer roadmap. New to the role? Start with what a Forward Deployed Engineer does.