Skip to content

Using Terraform Cloud

This guide walks you through everything you need to know to effectively manage your infrastructure with Terraform Cloud.

Authentication

In order to log in to Terraform Cloud, navigate to the following url. Enter your credentials and click Sign in to access your environment. After logging in, you will be redirected to your available organizations.

Organizations

An organization in Terraform Cloud is where your teams and projects are grouped. It helps you manage who can access what, and keeps everything in one place. To access the Thynk organization, click on Please-Ask-M. This will take you to all the relevant workspaces.

Workspaces

A workspace in Terraform Cloud is where your infrastructure lives. Each workspace manages a separate set of Terraform configurations, state files, and runs. You can think of it as a project folder for a specific part of your infrastructure.

The hosting infrastructure can be found under the workspace called hosting-infrastructure. This infrastructure reflects the Rancher cluster.

Runs

A run is the process Terraform Cloud uses to plan and apply changes to your infrastructure. It shows what will change before making any updates, helping you review and approve everything safely.

You can start a new run in Terraform Cloud by clicking + New Run. You can choose to run a plan (which shows what changes would be made) or plan & apply (which also applies those changes to your infrastructure).

States

A state is how Terraform keeps track of your real infrastructure. It records what resources exist and their current settings, so Terraform knows what to add, change, or delete during runs.

When you click on a state, Terraform Cloud displays the current resources in a structured JSON format, giving you a clear view of what’s been deployed.

Variables

Variables let you customize your Terraform configurations without hardcoding values. You can define things like region, instance size, or environment name, and reuse the same setup across different projects.

Workspace variables apply to a single workspace and are great for project-specific settings or secrets. Mark them as sensitive to keep values hidden.

Variable sets can be shared across multiple workspaces, making them ideal for common configurations like cloud credentials. Sensitive values are supported here too.