Terraform plans are not portable across environments

Terraform plans are great for:

• Seeing exactly what’s going to change
• Adding a review/approval step in CI
• Preventing accidental destructive operations

But the subtle catch is, a terraform plan is only valid for the exact set of inputs it was created with.

If your configuration depends on environment variables or dynamic values, those are not embedded in the plan.

This means:

• Plan in CI
• Apply elsewhere

…can produce unexpected behavior if inputs differ.

This, while inconvenient, prevents any sensitive information leaking into plan artifact. Worth keeping in mind while building CI/CD workflows around Terraform.