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Ephemeral values in Terraform
- Before Terraform 1.11, managing sensitive values was a challenge as they were persisting to plan artifacts and state, but ephemerality was introduced to handle this securely.
- In computing, ephemerality refers to creating temporary data that exists briefly and is discarded after use, and Terraform uses this concept for managing sensitive data.
- Ephemeral resources in Terraform are temporary and allow for secure handling of sensitive data without persisting them to the plan artifact or state file.
- Ephemeral resources run during both plan and apply stages and depend on existing resources, ensuring proper dependency management.
- Write-only arguments in Terraform are used for managing sensitive values securely and are not persisted to the plan artifact or state file.
- Terraform providers implement write-only arguments to handle sensitive values like passwords and tokens, ensuring their security.
- Write-only version arguments help track changes in write-only values and allow for updating them by incrementing the version number.
- Ephemeral resources in Terraform can be deferred to the apply stage if their input arguments reference values not known during planning.
- The lifecycle of an ephemeral resource involves opening for data access, renewing if needed for longer access, and closing once no longer required.
- By persisting ephemeral secrets in a secure manner, Terraform ensures that sensitive values are handled safely and reliably during the apply stage.
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