Infrastructure as Code That Eliminates Drift

Terraform is the industry standard — multi-cloud, massive ecosystem, and the most widely known. It is the right default choice for most teams. Pulumi is excellent for teams who want to use real programming languages (TypeScript, Python, Go) and leverage existing software engineering practices. CloudFormation is AWS-native and requires no additional tooling, but is verbose and AWS-only — use it only if you have a strong reason to avoid third-party tooling.

Terraform state is stored remotely in an S3 bucket (or Terraform Cloud) with DynamoDB-based state locking to prevent concurrent applies. State buckets are versioned and encrypted. Access is restricted to CI/CD service accounts via IAM. State files are never committed to source control. Sensitive outputs in state are treated as secrets.

Yes — Terraform's import command (and the newer import blocks in Terraform 1.5+) can bring existing resources under Terraform management without destroying and recreating them. We audit existing infrastructure, generate configuration that matches it, import resources into state, and validate that a subsequent plan produces no changes before proceeding.

Secrets are never hardcoded in IaC code or state. We use data sources to read secrets at apply time from AWS Secrets Manager, HashiCorp Vault, or similar. For values that must be passed as inputs, we integrate with CI/CD secret stores. Checkov and tfsec scans catch hardcoded credential patterns before they reach the repository.

GitOps is the practice of using a Git repository as the single source of truth for infrastructure state — all changes are made via pull requests, plans are posted as PR comments for review, and applies happen automatically on merge. It brings the same review, audit trail, and rollback capabilities to infrastructure that pull requests bring to application code. We recommend it for any team with more than two engineers touching infrastructure.