Terraform Cloud — Lesson 4: Run Operations, Drift, Locks, Recovery, and Team Runbooks

Technical Scope

• Run states, queueing, confirmations, and discards
• State versions, locks, and recovery controls
• Drift and out-of-band change handling
• Audit evidence, support, and workspace runbooks

Instructor Demonstration

Diagnose a blocked run and recover without losing traceability.

Applied Workshop

Write a workspace-owner runbook for failed, stale, or drifted runs.

1. Translate the scenario into configuration, access, state, pipeline, or module decisions.
2. Implement the change in a controlled workspace or repository.
3. Capture the plan, logs, outputs, policy results, and post-change checks.
4. Explain one safer or more maintainable alternative and its trade-off.

Validation Standard

Recovery preserves state history and documents the reason for manual intervention.

• The intended target, identity, environment, and state boundary are confirmed.
• The plan or execution evidence contains no unexplained destructive action.
• Security, reliability, maintainability, and operational ownership are reviewed.
• The final result can be reproduced from version-controlled inputs.

Failure Analysis

Handle stale locks, changed plans, drift, queue delays, and failed confirmation.

Learners isolate the smallest verified cause, correct it, rerun the relevant validation step, and record the preventive action in the course improvement log.