Most Terraform guides assume you're starting fresh with unlimited time and a dedicated DevOps team. They showcase architectures built from scratch, with organized modules and comprehensive testing pipelines. That's not the reality for most of us.
I'm a senior developer at a small telemedical company in Halifax. We handle a few million requests monthly with critical healthcare infrastructure that can't go down. When I decided to implement Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, it wasn't because we needed to scale to thousands of servers, it was because I was tired of living in fear of our own infrastructure.
If our two-person technical team can justify Terraform, anyone can. Here's why Infrastructure as Code isn't about scale—it's about sanity.
The Problem IaC Actually Solves
The decision to adopt Terraform didn't come from reading best practices or planning for hypergrowth. It came from trauma.
When I joined the company, our cloud infrastructure was almost completely undocumented. We had a vague network diagram but that was it. Storage buckets with cryptic names, security groups with mystery rules, EC2s with configurations that nobody remembered creating. The previous setup worked, but nobody knew why or how to replicate it.
Every deployment was a game of whack-a-mole. Why did beta behave differently than production? What was that random S3 bucket doing? The infrastructure worked, but it was a house of cards that I feared would collapse with the next change.
This is the real problem that Infrastructure as Code solves for small teams: documentation anxiety. Not scaling anxiety, not enterprise compliance requirements—just the basic fear that you don't understand your own infrastructure.
It's incredibly easy to take on infrastructure debt. You need to test something quickly, so you spin up a resource manually. You're debugging an issue, so you tweak a security group through the console. You're under pressure to ship, so you hardcode a configuration "just this once." Each decision makes sense in isolation, but collectively they create a system that's impossible to understand or replicate.
The breaking point for us came when I was trying to troubleshoot why our beta environment behaved differently than production. What should have been a five-minute investigation turned into a day-long expedition through AWS console screens, trying to reverse-engineer decisions made months earlier. That's when I realized: if I can't confidently recreate my infrastructure, I don't really control it.
Getting Started Without Perfect Conditions
Every Terraform tutorial assumes you're starting with a blank AWS account and unlimited time to architect the perfect setup. The reality for small teams is messier: you have existing infrastructure, no DevOps expertise, and production systems that can't go down while you learn.
The Import Dilemma
My first real challenge wasn't learning Terraform syntax—it was deciding what to do with our existing infrastructure. We already had databases, storage buckets, and various services running in production. Should I import everything into Terraform management? Leave some things manual? Start fresh and migrate later?
I chose a hybrid approach that felt uncomfortable but worked: I imported critical infrastructure that changed frequently (like our application servers) and left stable resources (like long-term storage buckets) as manual. It wasn't perfect, but it let me get value from Terraform immediately while avoiding a massive migration project.
This taught me an important lesson: you don't need to Terraform everything to get value from Terraforming something. Starting with your most painful pain points is better than waiting for the perfect migration strategy.
Learning Solo Without a Safety Net
The biggest difference between implementing Terraform at a small company versus a large one isn't technical—it's social.
At larger companies, you have code reviews, DevOps expertise, and multiple people who can catch your mistakes.
As the sole developer responsible for infrastructure, every terraform apply was a leap of faith.
I made some decisions early on that seemed reasonable but turned out to be suboptimal.
For example, I managed all our environments (production, beta, and customer service) using a single main.tf file
with three separate module instances—one for each environment.
This worked, but it made testing changes painful because I had to use terraform apply -target constantly to avoid affecting other environments.
It took me months to discover that Terraform workspaces existed and were designed exactly for this use case. This is the kind of knowledge gap that gets filled naturally when you have experienced teammates, but falls through the cracks when you're learning solo.
The Evolution: From Targets to Workspaces
The single-file approach became unsustainable when I realized I was using terraform apply -target for almost every deployment.
This is widely considered bad practice because it breaks Terraform's dependency management,
but it was the only way to test changes in beta without risking production.
I knew I needed to migrate to separate workspaces, but the migration seemed daunting. How do you move from one state file to multiple workspace-specific state files without reimporting everything?
My solution felt hacky at the time: I manually copied the relevant sections from our monolithic state file into
separate workspace-specific state files. I expected this to break catastrophically, but to my surprise, it worked perfectly.
When I ran terraform plan in each new workspace, Terraform recognized all the existing resources without any issues.
I later learned that my "hacky" approach was actually very close to the official terraform state push method.
Sometimes what feels like improvisation is actually an intuitive understanding of how the underlying system works.
Terraform state files are just JSON that maps your configuration to real-world resources—as long as that mapping is accurate,
Terraform doesn't care how the state file got there.
This migration seriously changed our deployment workflow. Testing changes in beta became straightforward, and I could confidently promote changes to production knowing they'd been validated in an identical environment.
Why It's Worth It Even When Imperfect
Small teams often hesitate to adopt Infrastructure as Code because they assume it requires enterprise-level investment and expertise. The reality is that you get immediate value even from imperfect implementations.
Budget Constraints Don't Disqualify You
One of the myths about infrastructure best practices is that they require unlimited budgets. For example, the "ideal" database setup for our healthcare application would include read replicas in multiple regions, automated failover, and comprehensive backup strategies across geographic boundaries.
Our budget reality was different. We use Google Cloud SQL with Enterprise Plus pricing, which gives us high availability within a region and automated backups. It's not the textbook solution, but it's appropriate for our scale and budget. The important thing is that this decision is documented in our Terraform configuration, along with the reasoning and potential future improvements.
Infrastructure as Code doesn't require perfect infrastructure—it requires documented infrastructure. Whether your setup is simple or sophisticated, having it defined in code means you can understand it, replicate it, and improve it.
Technical Debt Is Manageable When It's Visible
Every small team accumulates technical debt, including infrastructure debt. The difference with Terraform is that your debt is explicit and searchable rather than hidden in console configurations and someone's brain.
For example, our Terraform setup includes several configurations that I know aren't optimal but work for now. These are documented with TODO comments issues for future improvement. The key is that future me (or a future teammate) can understand the current state and make informed decisions about what to improve and when.
Contrast this with undocumented infrastructure, where technical debt is invisible until it causes downtime. With Infrastructure as Code, you can see your shortcuts, understand their implications, and prioritize improvements based on actual impact rather than archaeological guesswork.
Environment Consistency Pays Dividends Immediately
The most immediate benefit of Terraform for small teams isn't scalability—it's consistency. Before Terraform, our staging environment was a rough approximation of production, maintained through manual changes and good intentions. Now our staging environment is identical to production except for instance sizes and data sources.
This consistency eliminates an entire category of bugs and deployment surprises. When something works in staging, I can deploy to production with confidence because I know the environments are functionally identical. This alone justifies the implementation effort.
Start Imperfectly, Improve Iteratively
If you're a solo developer or small team considering Infrastructure as Code, my advice is simple: start now, start small, and start imperfectly.
You don't need to:
- Import all existing infrastructure immediately
- Design the perfect module structure upfront
- Implement every best practice from day one
- Wait until you have DevOps expertise
You do need to:
- Pick one painful infrastructure problem and solve it with Terraform
- Accept that your first implementation won't be perfect
- Prioritize documentation over optimization
- Learn by doing rather than waiting for perfect knowledge
The documentation benefits show up immediately. The consistency benefits appear within weeks. The confidence benefits grow over time as you understand and control your infrastructure rather than fearing it.
If our two-person team can justify the investment in Infrastructure as Code, any team can. The question isn't whether your infrastructure is complex enough to deserve IaC—it's whether you want to understand and control what you've built.
Your future self will thank you for starting today, even if you start imperfectly. Trust me on this one.
Have questions about implementing Terraform for small teams? Found this useful? I'd love to hear about your experience with Infrastructure as Code in resource-constrained environments.