Many engineers think manual approval begins and ends with a pipeline pause.
The more important question is who controls the approval decision.
In this lesson, we examine manual approval workflows from the perspective of authorization boundaries. Terraform creates requests, approvers record decisions, and infrastructure creation proceeds only when those decisions satisfy deployment requirements.
The lesson walks through approval state stored outside Terraform, lifecycle preconditions that enforce approval requirements, and IAM boundaries that prevent automation from approving its own changes.
The goal is not to add another pipeline stage.
The goal is to separate authority from execution.