Managing Multiple Environments in Terraform with Workspaces and the LXD Provider

This article explains the Terraform workspace concept, which lets a single configuration directory maintain several independent state files. It is most useful when the same resources must be deployed across environments such as test, staging, and production with varying properties. The author notes that workspaces are unsuitable for managing different user accounts, separate provider blocks, or versioning. The examples are built on LXC using the Terraform LXD provider, varying instance counts, network gateways, storage pools, and profiles per environment. The approach relies on a single main.tf file that uses local values and variables keyed by workspace name.