> Using the -target option to terraform plan is discouraged (the Terraform documentation says, “this is for exceptional use only”). Anyway, it’s likely to lead

> Using the -target option to terraform plan is discouraged (the Terraform documentation says, “this is for exceptional use only”). Anyway, it’s likely to lead to confusing infrastructure states if changes are applied incrementally with ad hoc, situational boundaries. We've been using -target for years, and while I understand very well the reasons it's discouraged, it is pretty much the only way you can have your cake and eat it too with respect to having "one large terraform project" and not running into terraform refreshes that make your eyes bleed. You end up having to really understand your module structure to use it, but it let us develop some very elegant workflows around tasks like patching. We developed a ruby code base that utilizes rake and the hcl2json tool to automate terraform-based infrastructure workflows, using various libraries to handle and validate that applications are happy with what terraform is doing to their servers while it works. This gives us flexibility to run automations safely against a terraform code base that has been evolving since version 0.3 or so, before most of the mistakes were made often enough to come up with the best practices we have today.