What I actually look for in a Terraform plan

Frida Hansen — Thu, 29 Oct 2026 11:00:36 +0000

I review plans for a living now, and I've stopped reading them top to bottom. The order I use:

Replacements first. Anything with -/+ is a resource being destroyed and recreated. Often fine, occasionally a database. I look at that list before anything else.

Then security group and IAM diffs, character by character. A single 0.0.0.0/0 or a widened action list is easy to miss in a wall of text and hard to undo quietly.

Then anything with a count or a for_each that grew. Three new replicas is a cost question, three hundred is an incident waiting to happen.

Finally deletions. A destroy on something that still has data is the only change I'll stop a deploy for.

The one rule I'd give anyone: if the plan is too long to review, that's the finding. Split the change. A two-hundred-line plan gets approved by scrolling, and scrolled-over plans are how prod gets interesting.

Nothing here is clever. It's just a reading order that stops me from approving what I didn't see.

DEV Community: Frida Hansen

What I actually look for in a Terraform plan