[scaryclam]

I often see people making what could be very simple terraform setups into incompehensible monolithic monsters as well.

I tend to preach separating things out and keeping things small. Why do you need a huge TF project to manage 15 services and have weird conditional parts when you can have 15 smaller projects that can deviate from a boilerplate template where it's sensible? I get that running "terraform apply" in one place makes the ops team's life easier, but the mess it creates in the actual TF isn't worthwhile IMO. And god forbid you use TF for your infrastructure and deploy using something that works more appropriately.

[sgarland]

The opposite can be true as well. I’ve seen TF environments that were designed with so many layers of abstractions that unraveling a single piece of infra was an incredibly long endeavor.

Solving Imaginary Problems At Scale is a thing. Monolithic TF – or at least one per env – will take you extremely far, and is easy to immediately understand. When it comes time to break out of it, don’t go overboard.