Hard-coding your local IP into Terraform firewall rules is a common anti-pattern that leads to stale rules and security drift. The Build5Nines/myip/http Terraform module dynamically retrieves the public IP of the machine running Terraform and feeds it into firewall rules (Azure NSG, AWS security groups, GCP firewall) as a CIDR. The post covers practical usage patterns across all three major clouds, explains failure modes like CI/CD egress unpredictability and baseline drift, and introduces a 'session access vs service access' mental model to use the pattern safely. Key guidance: keep dynamic IP rules in a separate overlay workspace, only use in CI/CD with stable egress, and treat the IP as execution context rather than permanent configuration.
