Comparison
Infrastructure statevsState file
Infrastructure state
the tool's record of what it built is a third thing, sitting between your file and the real cloud, and all three can disagree.
The recorded mapping between the resources declared in your configuration and the real objects that exist, held in a file or a backend. It exists because most cloud APIs cannot tell you which of their objects came from which declaration, so the tool has to remember. Almost every advanced problem in this space — drift, imports, replacements, corrupt state — is a consequence of that third copy existing at all.
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 →