Platform & DevOps·Infrastructure described in a file
the entire record of what your infrastructure is lives in one JSON file, and it contains the database password in clear.
State file
Also calledtfstate, state backend, remote state
The concrete artefact holding infrastructure state, stored remotely so a team shares one copy. It is simultaneously the most critical and most casually treated file in the estate: losing it means the tool no longer knows anything it built, and it frequently contains secrets in plain text because resource attributes are recorded verbatim. Versioning and encrypting the backend is not optional, and neither is keeping people out of it.