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Thoughts on Terraform state management, infrastructure parallelism, and building better developer tools.

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Engineering Log: Testing round-trip validation for lossless ingestion

Engineering Log Data Integrity Stategraph OCaml Testing

Stategraph ingests Terraform state files through four transformations. We built a round-trip validation test to prove that every transformation is lossless and no data gets lost along the way.

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The infrastructure stack is getting faster. Terraform is not.

Platform Engineering Terraform Infrastructure Velocity Engineering Leadership Developer Experience

Every layer of the stack is accelerating except infrastructure. Engineering leaders are demanding velocity. Terraform has the ecosystem but not the speed. That's a solvable problem.

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Don't force unlock Terraform state. Do this instead.

Terraform State Locking State Management Error Troubleshooting DevOps

Forcing a Terraform state unlock bypasses the safety mechanism that prevents concurrent modifications and state corruption. Before you run that command, understand what's actually happening and what you should do instead.

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Fix 'Error Acquiring the State Lock' in Terraform

Terraform State Locking Error Troubleshooting Distributed Systems DevOps

Terraform's state lock error is not a bug. It's a design choice that trades velocity for correctness, and understanding why reveals fundamental limitations in how we coordinate infrastructure changes.

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Terraform state locking explained (and why it hurts at scale)

Terraform State Locking Distributed Systems Scalability DevOps

Terraform state locking is a distributed coordination problem solved with filesystem semantics. The result is predictable: global mutexes, deployment queues, and superlinear contention as teams scale.

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