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Stategraph: Terraform state as a distributed systems problem


Terraform state is a distributed systems problem masquerading as file storage. Graph state fixes the bottlenecks.

The Terraform ecosystem has spent a decade working around a fundamental architectural mismatch: we're using filesystem semantics to solve a distributed systems problem. When we started building infrastructure automation at scale, we discovered that Terraform's state management exhibits all the classic symptoms of impedance mismatch between data representation and access patterns. Lock acquisition and state queries operate directly on the database representation of the graph, enabling precision and concurrency that file-based backends can't provide.

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