You can save yourself from scary operations like deleting everything by a.) not rooting your entire infra in the same main.tf and b.) using Terraform's lifecycl

You can save yourself from scary operations like deleting everything by a.) not rooting your entire infra in the same main.tf and b.) using Terraform's lifecycle meta-argument: https://www.terraform.io/docs/configuration/resources.html#lifecycle-lifecycle-customizations https://www.terraform.io/docs/configuration/resources.html#l... I like to use the lifecycle feature for suuuper core things that will never be deleted (VPC, r53 zone, etc) and eventually when I start targeting multiple DCs w/ lots of infra I'll eventually move to many state roots (or use tools like Terragrunt, which make things mildly scary again).