Back in 2017 I wrote about recovering orphaned Terraform state with the import command. That post is still up because the situation is still the same: somebody created infra without managing state, somebody else has to bring it back under control, and you’re the somebody else. What’s changed is the tooling. Three things, mostly. ...
This was written in 2017 when terraform import was the only option. The toolkit looks different now; see Recovering Terraform State, Eight Years Later for what I’d do today. Here’s the scenario… you have documented the steps for creating new infrastructure using Terraform including ensuring that state files are dealt with properly (remote in AWS S3). However, at some point those directions aren’t followed and you now have infrastructure that is orphaned with no state. What do you do? ...