Terraform Wants to Replace the Database. Apply Now?
A routine terraform plan unexpectedly wants to destroy and recreate the production database. Defend whether to apply, and how.
the decision you defend
Your terraform plan for a small tag change shows it will destroy and recreate the production RDS instance (force replacement). It is mid-afternoon, peak traffic. Do you apply now, and if not, what do you do instead?
the situation
You open a pull request that changes one tag on your RDS instance. CI runs terraform plan. Instead of a quiet in-place update, the plan reports: aws_db_instance.main must be replaced with # forces replacement next to one attribute, and a summary of 1 to destroy, 1 to add.
context
It is 2:40 PM on a Tuesday, near peak traffic. The instance holds live production data. Hourly automated snapshots are enabled. Three other engineers are waiting on this PR to merge so they can rebase. The CI pipeline has an apply step that is one approval click away.
How this challenge works
Take a position on the decision above and defend it. A senior-engineer AI will push back over up to 5 rounds. When you are done, you are scored against a verified rubric so you can see exactly what a complete answer covers - these are learning prompts, not gotchas.