For some time now we've been recommending explicitly passing data between
configurations using separate resource types and data sources, rather than
always using terraform_remote_state, for reasons including reducing
coupling between subsystems and allowing a configuration's state snapshots
to be under restrictive access controls.
However, those recommendations have so far not appeared directly in the
documentation for terraform_remote_state, and have instead just been
alluded to elsewhere in the documentation when discussing ways to pass
data between configurations.
This change, then, is an attempt to be clear and explicit about the
recommendation and to give a variety of specific examples of how to
implement it. The terraform_remote_state data source page is admittedly
not the most obvious place in the information architecture to put a set
of alternatives to it, but it does appear that this documentation page is
where people most commonly end up when researching options in this area
and so I've put this here in an attempt to "meet people where they are".
Possibly in a future documentation reorganization we might have an
separate page specifically about sharing data between configurations, but
we don't currently have time to do that bigger reorganization. If we do so
later, the content on this page could potentially be replaced with a
summary of the recommendation and a link to another place for the details,
but the goal here is to make this information visible in the existing
location people look for it, rather than blocking until there's a better
place for it to live.
This also includes a small amount of editing of some existing content on
the page to use terminology and style more similar to how our main
configuration language documentation is written,.
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