Make Terraform faster — skip unnecessary checks (AWS and S3)
Working with Terraform on a daily basis I feel it can be a good idea to share some small tips I have. Let me start with this one.
Initializing remote state S3 backend is pretty fast operation, but it can be even faster if you disable all unnecessary checks:
terraform {
backend "s3" {
encrypt = true
region = "..."
key = "..."
bucket = "..."
dynamodb_table = "..."
skip_metadata_api_check = true
skip_region_validation = true
skip_credentials_validation = true
}
}
provider "aws" {
region = "..."
skip_requesting_account_id = true # this can be tricky
skip_get_ec2_platforms = true
skip_metadata_api_check = true
skip_region_validation = true
skip_credentials_validation = true
}
Notes:
- Skipping region validation on S3 backends became available in Terraform 0.11.2 (see PR):
skip_region_validation = true
I didn’t spend too much time measuring time difference, but it certainly reduces time required for initializing S3 backend by 20%. This is not a big deal if you have just a few remote states and you run terraform init seldom.
I usually use Terragrunt with lots of isolated state files and run terragrunt validate-all on CI. It saves second here, second there.
More importantly skipping these checks will allow you to run terraform plan without having internet access (on the plane, for eg).
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