"forces replacement": the Terraform plan line nobody reads

Line 267 of a 427-line Terraform plan: # aws_rds_cluster.reporting must be replaced - /+ resource "aws_rds_cluster" "reporting" { ~ arn = "arn:aws:rds:us-east-1:842910557412:cluster:reporting" - > ( known after apply ) ~ cluster_resource_id = "cluster-D85642F9611A" - > ( known after apply ) ~ engine_version = "14.9" - > "15.4" ~ id = "reporting" - > ( known after apply ) ~ storage_encrypted = false - > true # forces replacement # (29 unchanged attributes hidden) } The merge request says "bump reporting Postgres to 15.4." The plan does exactly that. It also destroys the reporting database and creates an empty one in its place. Underneath the known-after-apply churn, two attributes are changing. One is the version bump, the thing your MR is about. The other is storage_encrypted flipping from false to true , and it isn't yours. Someone on another team that shares this repo merged it earlier in the week. You're just the one deploying. You review other people's Terraform MRs and have a feel for what each stack normally does; most weeks someone else shepherds the deploy. Today it's you. Your change goes out next, so you're carrying everything merged since the last deploy, including work you never reviewed and had no reason to know about. Nobody was negligent. The queue simply had someone else's change in it. It's a good change, by the way. You want encrypted storage. But there's no in-place path from unencrypted to encrypted on an RDS cluster. Terraform's only move is destroy and create. That's what -/+ means, and the comment at the end of the line says it in plain English: forces replacement . And the version bump alone would have failed. Going from 14 to 15 is a major version upgrade, and Aurora refuses those unless the config sets allow_major_version_upgrade = true . This one doesn't. That MR by itself would have died at apply, loudly, with an error naming the exact problem. A replacement doesn't upgrade anything. It creates a new cluster at 15.4 from scratch, so the f