Terraform Doesn't Know About the Manually-Made DB. Just Let It Recreate It?
A prod RDS instance was made by hand and Terraform now wants to destroy and recreate it. A teammate says just apply. Defend what you actually do first.
Terraform
Databasesthe decision you defend
You're bringing a manually-created prod RDS instance under Terraform, and plan shows Terraform wanting to destroy and recreate it because it's not in state. A teammate says just apply it, Terraform will make a matching one and we'll be consistent. What do you do, and why?
the situation
A production database was created by hand in the AWS console months ago and is now being adopted into Terraform. You run terraform plan and it shows a create for the RDS instance - and because the live resource is not tracked in state, applying that create would replace the running production database. A teammate looks at the green plan and says it is fine.
context
The RDS instance holds live customer data and has been serving production traffic for months. It exists in the account but not in Terraform state, so Terraform has no knowledge of it. A teammate in chat says: just apply it, Terraform will make a matching one and then everything is consistent and codified.
How this challenge works
Take a position on the decision above and defend it. A senior-engineer AI will push back over up to 4 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.