Terraform Module Breaking Change Detection

Description

As platform engineering scales, maintaining Terraform modules becomes critical to ensure consistency, reliability, and alignment with organizational standards. Terraform Tests is a framework designed to bring unit testing to Terraform modules, allowing teams to validate expected behaviors—such as resource attributes—through automated tests. In environments with open contributions and many stakeholders, enforcing global module policies becomes increasingly complex. One significant challenge platform teams face is detecting breaking changes to modules. While simple breaking changes—like a renamed input variable—can often be caught manually during PR reviews, more subtle upgrade-breaking changes pose a greater risk. These are changes that prevent a smooth upgrade path between module versions, requiring manual intervention or potentially causing production issues. In this talk, we’ll explore how to detect such upgrade-breaking changes automatically. We'll share our experience building tooling around Terraform Tests to surface these issues early in the development lifecycle, improving confidence in module evolution and enabling safer upgrades across teams. Speaker: Kévin Andrieux Subscribe to our YouTube Channel → https://www.youtube.com/c/HashiCorp?sub_confirmation=1 For hands-on interactive labs, visit HashiCorp Developer → https://developer.hashicorp.com/ HashiCorp, an IBM company, helps organizations automate hybrid cloud environments with Infrastructure and Security Lifecycle Management. HashiCorp offers The Infrastructure Cloud on the HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) for managed cloud services, as well as self-hosted enterprise offerings and community source-available products. For more information, visit hashicorp.com. For more information → https://hashicorp.com LinkedIn → https://linkedin.com/company/hashicorp X → https://x.com/HashiCorp Facebook → https://facebook.com/HashiCorp