Terraform on Lykins Blog

Codified Observability — Layer 3: Provisioning

Thu, 04 Jun 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This is part 4 of a series based on my DevOpsCon San Diego 2026 talk. Part 3 put the LGTM stack on Nomad. This post is Layer 3 — Provisioning: dashboards and alerts that ship with the service, not weeks later.

The code lives in 3-terraform/ of the devopscon-2026 lab.

The Secondary Step

Infrastructure deploys. The dashboard gets added later. Alert thresholds are set by gut feel and never reviewed. The dashboard only lives in Grafana — not in git. Observability config has no ownership and no history.

Scaling Terraform Test in GitLab

Thu, 28 May 2026 00:00:00 +0000

As Terraform module counts grow, testing stops being a “nice to have” and becomes the thing that either keeps your platform honest or quietly falls apart. The hard part is rarely writing a single terraform test file — it is making that pattern repeatable across every resource module, every composite module, and every merge request without copying CI logic into a dozen repos or hundreds of repos.

I put together a small public GitLab group, terraform-test, to walk through one way to scale this: resource-specific modules, composite modules that compose them into a solution, and a shared CI template that runs terraform test the same way everywhere.

Terraform Professional + HashiConf Talk

Wed, 28 Aug 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Just a short little update today. I am going to be documenting a new series of blog posts.

HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Authoring and Operations Professional

Took the test as part of the beta program a while back and finally got a result :)

It was a fun opportunity and would recommend others to give it a shot!

HashiConf Presentation

So back when a call for presenters went out for HashiConf, I put out a short topic on learning Nomad. It is one of the Hashi products which has intrigued me the most. I just have not had a reason or opportunity to work with it. Especially with 2 kids aged 3 and under, the amount of free time I have to learn something new is limited.

Terraform Cloud Agents - Podman

Fri, 16 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Question came up if Podman could run Terraform Cloud agents. Assumption would be yes, but surprisingly I did not see anyone posts or documentation on it. For those who do not care to read through this, the answer is yes.

Introduction - Terraform Agents Agents

If you are not familiar with Terraform Cloud agents, they are essentially ways to extend runs from Terraform Cloud/Enterprise within a private network.

Runs are pulled by the agents.

Terraform Removed Block

Thu, 07 Dec 2023 20:59:45 -0500

Decided to test out the new state block which looks to be released in v1.7.

Stemmed from this request in the hashi forums. https://discuss.hashicorp.com/t/request-for-testing-removed-block/60511

For now, you can find some documentation and usage here: https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform/pull/34339/commits/9af31fb5ce8fe983fc212390659215cf6501c85d

At this point it looks like a holy trinity of state blocks will be finished - import, moved, and now removed.

I conducted a simple test, and similar to import and move, additional feature support has been added.