If you care about resilience, governance, or avoiding 2am fire drills—you want your infrastructure in code. All of it. But increasing IaC coverage isn’t just a nice-to-have anymore. It’s the difference between control and chaos. So if you’re trying to scale Terraform (or bring unmanaged resources under control) here’s a handy checklist for what to look for in a IaC Platform.
First thing: Why an IaC Platform?
Short version: If a resource isn’t in code, it isn’t backed up. If it isn’t backed up, it isn’t recoverable. If it isn’t recoverable… you’ve got a resilience problem.
That’s just to start. When infra lives outside Terraform, you also lose:
- Governance: No traceability. No approvals. No safety net.
- Security: No proactive enforcement. No policy checks.
- Speed: Every manual change is a future incident waiting to happen.
You can’t scale with ClickOps. You can only scale with code.
Now that that’s out of the way…
What Should the Right IaC Platform Do?
If you’re serious about full Terraform coverage, there are some absolute non-negotiables:
Show You What’s Not in Code
Step one: visibility. You need a platform that shows you, across all clouds, regions, and accounts, exactly which resources are unmanaged. Not just compute—but IAM, DNS, storage, networking, containers, you name it.
Group Related Resources Intelligently with your Iac Platform
Resources don’t live in silos. Your platform should group related infrastructure logically – by environment, service, function, or architecture pattern—so you can manage it like a system,
not a list of files.
That’s what makes the difference between usable code and unusable sprawl.
Generate Smart, Human-Readable Code
No bloat output. Or 300-line HCL dumps with every default included.
You want production-grade Terraform:
- Clean resource structure
- Proper use of locals, variables, and outputs
- Logical ordering and dependency resolution
- No hardcoded values or meaningless defaults
- No “true”, “”, or null noise
It should mirror how your infra actually works—not how it was scraped from an API.
Auto-Generate the State File
No platform should just hand you Terraform code and walk away.
If it doesn’t also create the corresponding Terraform state, you’re stuck manually running terraform import one resource at a time.
And if you do get an import block, you still need to run ‘terraform apply’ for each stack, very nice in a demo, not scalable in reality when you need to import hundreds of stacks.
That adds friction and risk at scale -especially when managing thousands of resources.
Worse, without state, you can’t trust your code reflects reality. Will you be surprised in your first drift check? Who knows
Iac Platform that Handle Scale Natively
You should be able to bulk import and open PRs for dozens—or even hundreds—of stacks, across accounts and regions. The platform should:
- Generate clean Terraform code
- Create accurate state files
- Open pull requests directly in your VCS
All without requiring custom scripting or CLI chaining. That’s what real Import at scale looks like.
Wire Up CI/CD and Drift Detection Automatically
Once the code’s in Git and state is stored, your pipeline should just work.
- Plan in every PR
- Policy enforcement before merge
- Drift detection wired in automatically
No YAML glue. No manual config. Just infra that flags issues early – before they hit production.
The Goal? Infrastructure Without the Bottlenecks
That’s the bar:
- ✅ Terraform code, grouped and clean
- ✅ Matching state files, no import blocks
- ✅ PRs opened in Git
- ✅ CI/CD connected and policy-enforced
- ✅ Drift detection running from day one
If your platform can’t get you close to this per stack—with minimal friction—it’s probably not built for the velocity your cloud needs.
CI/CD. Drift detection. Policy enforcement… These aren’t “nice to haves.” They’re critical infrastructure. If they’re missing, your platform isn’t really ready for scale.
Want to see what Iac Platform looks like in practice?
Book a meeting to see how ControlMonkey helps teams codify their cloud—fast, clean, and at scale.
