There are some differences between the Terraform CLI and Terraform Cloud ideas of workspaces.
This documentation aims to explain those differences and show different patterns for configuring the remote backend and the implications of different approaches.
The Terraform Enterprise brand has now been split into two parts:
- Terraform Cloud is the application that helps teams use Terraform together,
with remote state storage, a shared run environment, etc.
- Terraform Enterprise is the on-premise distribution that lets enterprises run
a private instance of the Terraform Cloud application.
The former TFE docs have been split accordingly.
After some discussion with "iamakulov" on Twitter it seems that the use
of the word "conflicts" and "merge conflicts" here was sounding like us
implicitly condoning the use of version control as a mechanism for
distributing local state files, which hasn't been recommended for quite
some time since remote state now provides a much more robust solution.
While here, I also tweaked some other language on this page for style and
for use of terminology we more commonly use in our more recent
documentation.
In an earlier commit we added the "Best Practices" situation to try to
clarify the intended uses of named workspaces and to warn against using
them as an alternative to system decomposition.
However, the prior statement was cautious in its recommendations in the
interests of being pragmatic, and as a result we've seen that users have
in some cases misunderstood or disregarded these recommendations.
The new "When to use Multiple Workspaces" section aims to be more explicit
that having multiple separate Terraform configurations is the preferred
solution for many use-cases, and that workspaces are intended for a
more limited set of use-cases around convenient development and testing.
It also emphasizes the analogy to version control branches that was just
a footnote in the prior text, to help the reader become familiar with the
concept by relating it to a concept and workflow they are hopefully
already familiar with.
This new section also attempts to provide a more elaborate description of
the proposed alternative when the goal is system decomposition. In the
long run some of this content would probably be better placed elsewhere
since it is useful advice even for users who never discover named
workspaces, but it can live here for the time being to limit the scope of
this change until we are ready to make more comprehensive revisions to
the docs in this area.
Finally, the introductory documentation here is adjusted slightly in
preparation for the intended future expansion of workspaces to include
stored variable values and, for more tailored backends like Terraform
Enterprise, a full log of prior operations. More revisions will be
required to cover the specifics of this later, but this new framing will
hopefully help users form a mental model of named workspaces that has
room for these future enhancements and the corresponding concept in
Terraform Enterprise, rather than our previous framing that workspaces
are fundamentally just named states.
Nick Fagerlund