What is a Terraform Stack?

Hey guys,

I see the concept of “terraform stacks” around but nothing in the official documentation. Can you guys help me explaining this concept? What is a stack? How can I use them, and so on?

(I’m not talking about CDK but just plain terraform)

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Hello @i4ki!

There’s is nothing in Terraform itself that is explicitly called a “Stack” today, although some folks use the term informally to refer to a set of Terraform configurations that interact together, such as via data sources.

Some third-party wrappers around Terraform do have a more formalized idea of “stack” (as does CDK for Terraform, as you noted) but exactly what that means is decided by the particular tool and not something I can answer generally.

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Hi @apparentlymart

Ok, this makes sense. Thank you for your time.

There’s is nothing in Terraform itself that is explicitly called a “Stack” today.

I think there’s an update on this?

There is, but the new thing has nothing to do with what this question was about two years ago, so let’s not discuss it here.

@sven.lito is talking about a new “stacks” feature that was announced at HashiConf yesterday, and is also discussed briefly in this article:

This feature is still very early and will be in a closed beta preview phase for a while to help make sure its details are ready for broad use. Therefore there is not much other commentary about it available yet except for the HashiConf keynotes. More will follow once it’s available.

I’m going to close this topic just to avoid spamming the person who originally opened it about a different subject. Feel free to start new topics if you want to discuss yesterday’s announcement!