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Mickey is ready to put his Terragrunt expertise into practice. One of his first tasks is configuring remote state to manage Terraform state files centrally. With Terragrunt’s streamlined syntax, he can declare all the necessary parameters and focus on building infrastructure—without getting bogged down in state management details.
Terragrunt automatically generates the Terraform backend configuration for you. This ensures consistent remote state settings across all environments.
In this lesson, we’ll start with an overview of Terraform Remote State, explore popular backends, and highlight security best practices.

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What Is Terraform Remote State?

Terraform Remote State provides a centralized repository for storing and organizing your .tfstate files. Think of it as the nerve center of your infrastructure:
  • Ensures a single source of truth for all team members
  • Prevents conflicting edits by serializing state updates
  • Simplifies collaboration and preserves deployment integrity
The image illustrates a Terraform remote state setup, showing how developer machines interact with a central state file and infrastructure through push and pull actions.
Terraform supports multiple backends, letting you choose the storage solution that best fits your environment:
BackendUse CaseDocumentation
AWS S3Scalable, cost-effective object storagehttps://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/aws/latest/docs/resources/s3_bucket
Azure Blob StorageNative Azure integration with RBAChttps://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/azurerm/latest/docs/resources/storage_account
HashiCorp ConsulHighly-available, on-premise KV storehttps://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/consul/latest/docs
The image shows icons for Amazon S3, Azure Storage, and HashiCorp Consul under the title "Terraform – Remote State."

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Security, Versioning, and Access Control

Beyond simple storage, Terraform Remote State offers:
  • Access Controls: Grant read/write permissions to specific IAM roles or users
  • State Versioning: Enable object versioning (e.g., S3 Versioning) to track changes
  • Encryption: Encrypt state at rest and in transit
The image illustrates a diagram of Terraform's remote state management, showing a user accessing a statefile with limited access and version control integration.
Your state file may contain sensitive data (passwords, IDs, etc.). Always enable encryption and restrict access to authorized team members only.

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Further Reading

By setting up remote state correctly, you create a robust foundation for collaborative, secure, and auditable infrastructure management.

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