Infrastructure as Code interview questions

Terraform state and drift, module design, and managing environments without duplication.

3 questions in DevOps & Cloud.

DevOps and CloudA 24-minute read on how the topic fits together, before the questions.DevOps and cloud fundamentals57 short answers on one page, for revising rather than studying.

hard3

hardDesignScenario

A Terraform plan in CI wants to destroy resources in production. What has to happen before anyone is allowed to approve it?

When a Terraform plan wants to destroy production, stop and identify whether the diff comes from state drift, a provider change, a renamed resource or real configuration intent. Do not approve until the blast radius is understood. It also connects IAC to the point an interviewer is testing.

6 minsenior, staff, lead

hardScenarioDesign

How do you engineer an automated reconciliation system to detect, remediate, and prevent Terraform state drift in a massive multi-account cloud environment?

A deep dive into managing Infrastructure as Code at scale, focusing on the architectural patterns required to handle state drift, enforce compliance, and maintain state integrity.

2 minsenior, staff

hardConceptDesign

Why is state the hard part of Terraform, and how do you manage drift, imports and locking around it?

State is the mapping from a config address to a real resource ID, so it is the only thing that tells Terraform whether to create or update. Drift, imports, refactors and concurrent applies are all consequences of that mapping being separate from both the code and the infrastructure.

6 minmid, senior, staff