Terraform is a configuration language over the top of providers that expose their own abstractions. The first thing to realize about using Terraform is that _y

Terraform is a configuration language over the top of providers that expose their own abstractions. The first thing to realize about using Terraform is that _you_ can extend it with your own providers written in a language like Go and _you_ can cobble together your own modules written in the TF configuration language to orchestrate multiple providers or do repeatable work. There are really solid open-source modules for AWS operations that smooth out the kinks in the AWS API. Second, use state and check it into an S3/R2 bucket. Keep your TF scripts in Git, and check them in too after changes. Make a checklist of what steps you take each time you modify a resource (first in the script, then in the state/live). Third, learn the command line tools used to fix horked state deployments. It'll happen from time to time, and there are GOOD tools that already exist to fix issues. Also, the state is JSON, and you _can_ edit it by hand if you need to get something to work. Remote cloud provider configuration is a complex problem space akin to programming-at-a-distance. It's hard because APIs are trash, APIs go down or flap in the middle of action, and APIs are slow, so debugging is tricky. Early on, a full tear down and rebuild policy helps, but quickly the slow APIs/slow cloud operations make you more reluctant to start from scratch. Oh, and databases require a completely different management approach. That said, I still endorse Terraform over Pulumi or the AWS CDK.