Terraform Operational Traps

Failure patterns from real deployments. Every item caused an incident. Organized as: exact error → root cause → copy-paste fix.

Provisioner traps (symptom → fix)

docker: not found in remote-exec

cloud-init still installing Docker when provisioner SSHs in.

provisioner "remote-exec" {
  inline = [
    "cloud-init status --wait || true",
    "which docker || { echo 'FATAL: Docker not ready'; exit 1; }",
  ]
}