Comparison
Infrastructure bootstrappingvsState file
Infrastructure bootstrapping
the state bucket and the pipeline's own permissions had to exist before the tool that creates everything could run once.
The problem that the infrastructure managing your infrastructure cannot manage itself into existence. Something — a human with elevated credentials, a small hand-run configuration — has to create the state backend, the identity and the pipeline before anything is automated. It is worth naming because it is the one hand-made corner of an otherwise codified estate, and it is exactly the corner nobody documents until a disaster recovery exercise needs it.
Full entry →State file
the entire record of what your infrastructure is lives in one JSON file, and it contains the database password in clear.
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.
Full entry →