Ricard Bejarano, Cisco
The Terraform plugin cache, unfortunately, does not support concurrent Terraform inits. This leaves us no other choices than disabling caching or serializing our inits, both of which would significantly slow down our Terraform pipelines, which are expected to make hundreds of plans in single-digit minutes.
In this talk we go over how we solved that with OverlayFS, a tool we rarely see outside of its niche, but so powerful that it helped us cut our plan times by 90%!
Ricard is a Lead Site Reliability Engineer at Cisco ThousandEyes' SRE team. His background is mostly networking, observability, incident management, infrastructure automation and hunting down the weirdest of bugs.
Ricard is responsible for a Terraform pipeline with 500+ developers, over 120k resources under management, and multiple thousands of plans a day.
author = {Ricard Bejarano},
title = {Speeding Up Terraform Caching with {OverlayFS}},
year = {2025},
address = {Dublin},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = oct
}
