6. Terraform State Management (~11%)

State has shadowed every phase so far; now it gets the full treatment. You'll learn where state lives (the local default versus remote backends), how teams share it safely (locking), and what happens when reality drifts from what Terraform recorded. Finally, 004 adds two language-level tools for changing how state maps to resources without destroying anything — the moved and removed blocks. Throughout, hold onto the Phase 1 idea: state is the middle term in reconciliation, so anything that changes state changes what Terraform plans.