What Is the Plan and Apply Cycle?
The plan and apply cycle is the two-phase workflow at the heart of declarative infrastructure tools. The plan phase compares desired configuration to current state and produces a diff of what will be created, changed, or destroyed. The apply phase executes that plan against the live environment, recording the new state.
Why it matters
Separating plan from apply lets humans review the exact change before anything mutates production. In CI, running the plan on a pull request makes the blast radius of an infrastructure change visible before merge.
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