Many teams organize Terraform around environments such as dev, staging, and production.
The larger question is whether Terraform is operating in the correct AWS account in the first place.
This lesson explores an account-first design approach. The workflow begins by verifying account identity, enforcing account allowlists, and recording account contracts before infrastructure is created. Resource naming, tagging, IAM policies, and CI/CD validation then build on that verified boundary.
Understanding this sequence helps explain why mature Terraform platforms treat AWS accounts as the primary deployment boundary rather than relying solely on environment names.