Day-06: AWS Terraform Project Structure Best practices

#30daysofawsterraform #aws #terraform

File Structure
Keeping everything such as variables, locals, providers, backend, outputs, resources related code in one file isn't a best practice and becomes an overhead as infrastructure grows and unmanageable.

There is a standard structure that needs to be followed by every DevOps engineer which is essential for scalability and maintainability and one of the recommended project structure is:

project-root/
├── backend.tf # Backend configuration
├── provider.tf # Provider configurations
├── variables.tf # Input variable definitions
├── locals.tf # Local value definitions
├── main.tf # Main resource definitions
├── vpc.tf # VPC-related resources
├── security.tf # Security groups, NACLs
├── compute.tf # EC2, Auto Scaling, etc.
├── storage.tf # S3, EBS, EFS resources
├── database.tf # RDS, DynamoDB resources
├── outputs.tf # Output definitions
├── terraform.tfvars # Variable values
└── README.md # Documentation

Terraform File Loading

Terraform loads all the files with .tf extension in the current directory
Terraform loads the files in lexicographical order (Alphabetical)
File names doesn't affect any code inside them
The above file structure is just an example and recommended by Hashicorp and this varies from organization and their use case
Another approach is to separate the files based on the environments or based on the resources as well

File organization principles