Terraform holds a solid position in the ADOPT category of SOK Tech Radar, and for a good reason. Most our teams rely on it to define and provision cloud infrastructure across AWS, Azure, and other platforms.
One of the Terraform’s biggest strengths lies in its modular architecture, which allows teams to use and share best practices through reusable modules.
Another reason to love Terraform? The frequent updates to HCL that often make me go “wooh”! This post dives into one such update — still in beta but offering a much cleaner approach to multi-region deployments.
The Traditional Approach: Provider Aliases
Managing AWS resources across multiple regions has traditionally required separate provider configurations for each of the regions. If you’ve ever needed to deploy something like an SNS topic in multiple regions, you probably know the spiel:
provider "aws" {
alias = "eu_north_1"
region = "eu-north-1"
}
provider "aws" {
alias = "eu_west_1"
region = "eu-west-1"
}
resource "aws_sns_topic" "test_eu_north_1" {
provider = aws.eu_north_1
}
resource "aws_sns_topic" "test_eu_west_1" {
provider = aws.eu_west_1
}
This approach works, but it’s verbose and repetitive. The real limitation becomes apparent when you try to scale: the provider argument couldn’t be used dynamically withfor_each, making regional deployments an exercise in copy-pasting and configuration clutter.
Enter the Region Meta-Argument
The Terraform AWS Provider 6.0.0 (currently in beta) introduces a new region meta-argument that overrides the provider-level region configuration. This allows you to specify the region directly at the resource level, eliminating the need for multiple provider aliases.
More importantly, the region meta-argument enables dynamic for_each loops for regional deployments, transforming how we handle multi-region infrastructure.
Here’s how you can now deploy the same SNS topics across multiple regions with significantly less boilerplate:
terraform {
required_providers {
aws = {
source = "hashicorp/aws"
version = "= 6.0.0-beta2" # Ensure we are using the latest beta version
}
}
}
provider "aws" {}
locals {
regions = ["eu-west-1", "eu-north-1"]
}
resource "aws_sns_topic" "test" {
for_each = toset(local.regions)
region = each.key
}
This is cleaner and easier to maintain. No more juggling multiple provider aliases or duplicating resource blocks.
Final Thoughts
While the AWS Provider 6.0.0 is still in beta, this feature represents a significant step forward in simplifying multi-region deployments. As teams increasingly adopt multi-region architectures for resilience and compliance, having cleaner, more maintainable Terraform configurations becomes crucial. This feature is definitely worth experimenting with!
