Interview › Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible)
How would you integrate Terraform into a CI/CD pipeline safely?
Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible) · Intermediate level
Answer
A safe Terraform CI/CD pipeline separates plan and apply, uses remote state locking, assumes least-privilege credentials, publishes the saved plan, requires review for production, runs policy and security checks before apply, and prevents concurrent runs per workspace.
Technical explanation
Use short-lived cloud credentials through OIDC or workload identity rather than long-lived static keys.
Separate read-only PR plans from privileged apply jobs.
Protect production applies with environment approvals and concurrency controls.
Keep Terraform's ownership boundary clear: one state should own a resource or field, and other tools should consume published outputs instead of modifying it.
Use fmt, validate, linting, policy checks, plan review, and state locking before production applies.
Design for small blast radius by splitting state around lifecycle, permissions, and recovery boundaries.
Hands-on example
1. Build a safe IaC delivery workflow for: How would you integrate Terraform into a CI/CD pipeline safely?
2. Pull request job:
terraform fmt -check
terraform init -backend=false
terraform validate
tflint --recursive
checkov -d .
terraform init
terraform plan -out=tfplan
terraform show -json tfplan > tfplan.json
3. Policy job evaluates plan JSON for public exposure, missing encryption, IAM wildcards, and destructive changes.
4. Apply job runs only after approval, uses remote state locking, short-lived cloud credentials, and applies the saved plan artifact.
5. For failures, rerun plan, inspect state and cloud objects, and fix root cause before any state surgery.
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More Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible) interview questions
- What is Infrastructure as Code, and what problems does it solve over click-ops?
- What is the difference between declarative and imperative IaC, and where do Terraform and Ansible fall?
- What is the difference between configuration management and provisioning?
- What is Terraform, and what is the core plan/apply workflow?
- What does terraform init do?
- What is the Terraform state file, and why is it critical?
- Why should state be stored remotely, and what backend would you use on AWS?
- What is state locking, and why does it matter for teams?