Thoughts on Terraform state management, infrastructure parallelism, and building better developer tools.
Terraform state was designed as a file. The next decade of infrastructure tooling treats it as a database, and the substrate is changing.
Terraform already walks a DAG during apply. But in-run parallelism isn't the bottleneck. The graph is ephemeral, not infrastructure.
Terraform's state lock error is a design choice that trades velocity for correctness, revealing fundamental coordination limitations.
Terraform state locking uses filesystem semantics for coordination. The result: global mutexes, deployment queues, and superlinear contention.
Terraform state is a distributed systems problem masquerading as file storage. Stategraph models it as a graph with ACID transactions and subgraph isolation.