Infrastructure as Code for Small Teams: A Pragmatic Terraform Setup

Most Terraform content is written for organizations with a dedicated platform team, multiple environments, and elaborate module registries. A small team doesn't need that structure — it needs infrastructure that's reproducible and reviewable without a full-time person maintaining the tooling around it.

• One repo, one state file per environment — skip the module registry complexity until you actually have multiple consumers.
• Remote state in a managed backend (Terraform Cloud or an S3 bucket with locking) from day one, never local state in git.
• `terraform plan` output posted automatically on every pull request — the review happens before apply, not after.
• Keep secrets out of state entirely; reference a secrets manager instead of hardcoding values Terraform will happily store in plaintext.

The goal for a small team isn't elegance — it's that infrastructure changes go through the same review discipline as application code, and that losing the one person who understands the setup doesn't mean losing the ability to change it.

Small-team infrastructure as code isn't about scale. It's about not being one person's tribal knowledge.