If you have never screwed up anything in production, no one at your org trusts you enough to give you production access. Which is ok and great for you, but at the end of the day SOMEONE has to have production access. You can write a devops template that wipes out data just as easy as you can sudo rm -rf /

I am much more terrified of Terraform than myself, especially `terraform destroy`. I mean, a human can only do so much so quickly but a script could kill everything semi-instantly.

I look at `terraform plan -destroy` and it still terrifies to destroy an internal service.

We actually had a production outage due to a `terraform destroy` typed in production instead of dev.

I say that all the time. You automation can be just as dangerous as prod ssh access.

And in some ways it is worse..

I remember at least one prod incident where a script made it out into prod and wiped out 100s of servers. Something like it had rm -rf /$SOME_ENV_VAR which was set in QA but not prod. Opps....

Imo, it's not about trust, it's about rigor.

Yah? Good luck with that

I'm talking about day to day mucking around in production by developers, not forbidding all access.

You're right. Its not about rigor, its about ethics.