The Infrastructure Stack Is Getting Faster. Terraform Is Not

If a person had had to write this, it would have said the same things in 1/5th as many words, with far more clarity.

It's too bad a great idea is diffused through pages of AI slop.

It is a great idea, and we'd be interested. Today, though, most of your dev audience want to watch a YouTube video instead of reading, this piece won't work for them.

And those who find YouTube a massive waste of time compared to the fast effectiveness of concise reading will stop reading this somewhere around “That's not an accident. It's architecture.” or *“The answer isn't… The answer is…”

If someone does make it through, they might grumble about a few things: buried lede; repetition without proof; competitor bashing; hand waving; claims about engineering but no design evidence; oceans of style bloat, negations (those 2 above that would make readers stop reading), absolutes; and not really actionable call to action.

You can get away with most of that if you don't do it fifteen times each.

Just for fun, I spun up an LLM too, for a different flavor of copy. Still marketing fluff, just way less of it:

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# Kill the Terraform state lock. Keep the Terraform ecosystem.

Terraform slows down when many people touch the same state file. Stategraph swaps that file for a database-style state store so different parts of your stack can change at the same time—while you still get a clear preview of what will change.

Terraform “state” is in a single file it locks while planning or applying infrastructure changes, to stay safe. That means plans wait, applies line up, and drift is found only when someone runs Terraform again. Right when you should be continuously delivering, instead your team loses time.

Stategraph is a Terraform state backend that treats your infrastructure like a graph in a database. It locks only the pieces being changed, takes snapshots for fast reads, and tracks what should exist versus what does exist—all the time.

Think of today’s state as one shared spreadsheet where only one person can hit Save. Stategraph turns it into a real database so many people can update different rows at once without stepping on each other.

With Stategraph, you will get:

- Faster applies: independent changes run in parallel.

- Fast plans: read from snapshots, so plans return in seconds.

- Always-on drift checks: the system notices and reports drift continuously.

- Same safety net: you still see the plan/diff before anything applies.

And you'll keep your providers, modules, policies, and audit trail. Use the Terraform CLI and workflows you already have. No Kubernetes control plane to run, just point Terraform at Stategraph instead of S3/DynamoDB.

To try this out for yourself, move your state to Stategraph, kick off two unrelated applies at once, and compare plan time and time spent waiting on locks. Confirm that drift alerts appear and that plan/diff looks the same as before.

If you're a team running lots of Terraform across many services and environments who want higher effectiveness without a rewrite, send a bit about your challenges along with your rough resource count and current backend, to talk about being a design partner.

You can help ensure Stategraph is exactly what you need.