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The Terraform question that actually filters. Everyone knows both meta-arguments exist; the answer is about how state addresses resources, and why an index is a fragile key.

Everyone answers state locking. The follow-up is what happens when locking is not configured, and what you do with a stale lock at 2am, which is where the answer gets real.

A staple of services-company interviews, and the boring answer (provisioning versus configuration) is only half of it. The useful half is what happens when you push either tool past its model.

State layout needs an access boundary. Separate environment credentials and restrict who can assume them; a directory name cannot contain a mistaken apply.

The services-market question that decides who can actually run a migration. Import is the easy part; the hard parts are resource-for-resource fidelity and proving the first plan is empty.

Drift is a governance problem wearing a tooling costume. Detection is easy; the scored content is attribution (who changed it and why) and the policy decision that most teams avoid making.

Extract too early and you maintain a wrapper nobody thanks you for. Here is the extraction trigger, the semver contract that maps onto Terraform surfaces, and the parallel-release path for breaking changes.

Everyone recites that depends_on forces ordering. The stronger half of the answer is the graph you never see: implicit edges from references, why file layout orders nothing, and what explicit edges cost.

HashiCorp calls provisioners a last resort and expects you to say why in concrete terms: tainted resources, invisible drift, SSH reachability. Then name what replaces each legitimate use.

The pitch is continuous reconciliation instead of a plan someone runs. The cost is that your cloud estate now depends on a cluster, and that drift correction without a plan step is a very different risk posture.

Most tagging initiatives are spring cleans that rot within two quarters. The durable answer treats the schema like an API contract enforced where resources are born, and knows which lever actually wins.

Generated infrastructure code is plausible, fluent and confidently wrong in specific ways. The volume goes up, the reviewer attention per line goes down, and the controls that used to be optional stop being optional.