How Terracotta AI Adds Pre-Deployment Safety Checks to Terraform Cloud Workflows
Terraform Cloud provides structure, safety, and automation for provisioning cloud infrastructure. It manages Terraform plans and applies, handles remote state storage, enforces policy-as-code, and brings collaboration into one cohesive platform. By removing the need to manage custom pipelines, it allows teams to focus on building and deploying with confidence.
However, there is one part of the Terraform workflow that Terraform Cloud does not directly address.
What happens before the Terraform code is merged from a pull request?
Most of the real risks in infrastructure as code begin upstream, in the pull request. This is the moment when a developer introduces change. That change might be secure, cost-efficient, and fully aligned with your infrastructure goals, or it might not. But identifying critical issues, such as drift, misconfigurations, excessive costs, and security risks, only comes into play after that decision has been made.
This is where Terracotta AI fits in.
Terracotta AI acts as an intelligent, pre-merge review layer. It helps teams understand exactly what a Terraform change will do before any CI pipeline or Terraform plan is triggered. The goal is to identify critical issues, such as drift, misconfigurations, excessive costs, and security risks, while the change is still in review.
Why Most Infrastructure Incidents Start in the PR
Terraform Cloud gives teams a reliable way to execute and manage infrastructure, but it cannot prevent problems that originate earlier in the workflow. Even with policy enforcement and strong automation, many of the worst incidents in production begin long before the plan file is generated.
Here are a few common examples:
- Drift that silently deletes resources
- Cost spikes that go unnoticed until billing
- Open ports or permissive IAM roles buried in diffs
- Terraform plan output that no one thoroughly reads
These problems do not come from the infrastructure platform. They stem from a lack of context during the review process.
Terracotta AI Adds the Missing Context to Terraform Cloud Workflows
Terracotta AI integrates directly with your GitHub or GitLab repository. It continuously analyzes your Terraform code, state files, and live cloud infrastructure. When a pull request is opened, it surfaces clear, actionable feedback that reviewers can trust.
This feedback is delivered before any CI pipeline runs and before it executes a plan.
Here is what Terracotta AI provides in each pull request:
- Detection of drift and state mismatches
- Identification of security risks such as open ingress, missing encryption, or overbroad IAM roles
- Cost impact previews, including resource-level deltas
- Natural language summaries of diffs that make reviews more straightforward and faster
- Blast radius analysis to show downstream impacts
- Detection of ghost infrastructure from applied but unmerged changes
This is not about static rules or generic linting. Terracotta AI is a context-aware system that helps teams reason about infrastructure as it exists, not just as it is written in code.
Terraform Cloud Executes Infrastructure. Terracotta Reviews It First.
The two tools serve different but complementary roles. Terraform Cloud handles execution. It runs plans and applies your infrastructure changes in a controlled, auditable environment. Terracotta AI ensures that what gets merged into the codebase is safe, stable, and ready for deployment.
Here is what the joint workflow looks like in practice:
- A developer opens a pull request
- Terracotta AI analyzes the code, state, and cloud metadata
- Reviewers receive structured feedback on drift, cost, and security impact
- The code is merged
- Terraform Cloud runs the plan and apply
There is no need to change your existing pipelines or adopt any new platform. Terracotta AI seamlessly integrates into your existing stack, delivering value immediately.
Why Teams Use Terracotta AI with Terraform Cloud
Many teams want to shift infrastructure ownership closer to developers. Terracotta AI makes that possible without compromising safety or governance.
Here is what we hear most from teams that adopt both:
- They want developers to manage infrastructure without reintroducing risk
- They have encountered surprises after the merge, including deleted infrastructure, budget overruns, or exposed services
- They need faster, more confident reviews without relying on raw plan output
- They are looking to scale reviews without burning out DevOps and platform engineers
Terracotta AI gives them the visibility they were missing. It makes infrastructure behavior understandable and reviewable in real-time, directly within the tools they already use.
Terracotta AI and Terraform Cloud Work Better Together
Terraform Cloud is where you deploy infrastructure. Terracotta AI ensures that the infrastructure is ready to run.
If your team uses Terraform Cloud and wants safer, faster, and more confident reviews, Terracotta AI plugs in upstream and starts delivering insight in minutes.
Start reviewing smarter.
Start catching problems before they ever reach terraform plan.
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