OpenTofu: Liberating IaC and DevOps beyond Terraform

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and DevOps have come together to completely reshape the cloud landscape over the last few years. For the uninitiated, IaC is a fundamental DevOps practice – a core component of continuous delivery. It lets DevOps teams use descriptive versioning to define and deploy topologies, networks, VMs, and servers within cloud environments. These form the supporting infrastructure that enable developers to deliver rapidly scalable applications using a unified set of tools and best practices.

Just like a piece of code delivers the same output every time it is run, an IaC model deploys a fixed environment every time it’s implemented.

So things were hunky-dory in IaC with both development and operations team configuring and automating their deployments in consistent CI/CD cycles until two things happened.

(Well, the two things didn’t exactly disrupt anything but they changed the way DevOps teams looked at and approached infrastructure orchestration and provisioning.)

Earthquakes in infrastructure automation

The story begins in August 2023 when HashiCorp, the custodians of Terraform, the most widely-used IaC framework, announced that they were moving its license from Mozilla Public License (MPL) to Business Source License (BSL).

This decision was met with massive pushback from the community, who wanted Terraform to retain an open source license and let the product be shaped by the community. However, HashiCorp didn’t listen – or respond – to the cries, probably because of what was to come a few months down the line (more on this in a moment).

The community struck back. Less than a week after the license change announcement, the OpenTofu (OpenTF at the time) fork was set in motion, designed to replicate and replace Terraform under an open source, community-driven umbrella.

Within six months, OpenTofu had become the IaC tool with the second highest growth potential (after Crossplane) – as per the State of IaC report, nearly 3x cloud professionals said they planned to use OpenTofu as opposed to Terraform.

Along came another quake in April this year, when IBM acquired HashiCorp to gain “extensive Infrastructure Lifecycle Management and Security Lifecycle Management capabilities to enable organizations to automate their hybrid and multi-cloud environments.”

Three months down the line, there are no indications that IBM has concrete plans to move Terraform back to open source. In fact, they already have a competing open source IaC tool in Ansible.

All these complications and uncertainties regarding Terraform’s future give developers and enterprises good reason to try out OpenTofu, which has been called “truly open source.”

OpenTofu gains ground

So how did OpenTofu, a straightforward fork of Terraform, achieve so much in so little time? After all, there were a lot of IaC frameworks already in the market, including Pulumi, Arm/Bicep, CloudFormation, and of course Ansible, which is owned IBM subsidiary Red Hat.

There are some solid reasons.

OpenTofu came under the aegis of the Linux Foundation relatively early in its lifecycle. Along with the credibility boost, this represents a commitment to remaining open source. OpenTofu will remain free to use, modify and distribute. All development will be completely transparent and community-driven – not controlled by a for-profit corporation.

OpenTofu achieved feature parity with Terraform at the speed of light (okay, at the speed of development). The latest production version, 1.7.0, has everything Terraform offered to DevOps and DevSecOps practitioners. And with a strategy to be more than just a clone – or fork – of Terraform, new features that diverge from Terraform are being introduced by the community.

OpenTofu also started out with tremendous support from the open source DevOps community, which is a particularly engaged bunch. Over 150 companies, including Env0, Gruntwork and Harness, and nearly 800 individual developers, have pledged their support. Naturally, this has led to widespread adoption in the enterprise as well as quick growth of the ecosystem – a large number of cloud service providers and tool vendors have added native support for OpenTofu.

Not all smooth sailing

All said and done, Terraform is still the most widely adopted IaC framework, used by 80% of all IaC practitioners, as per the State of IaC report. A Reddit poll conducted soon after OpenTofu was announced showed that the majority of respondents were sitting on the fence when it came to migrating from Terraform. That may well have changed in the last few months, but there are no updated data or stats available to prove it.

OpenTofu still has a couple of significant obstacles in its path before it can become the sole dominant force in IaC, though.

First, Enterprise trust is hard to gain. Many companies might prefer to stick with the tried and tested Terraform, even if RUM pricing hurts them. Multimillion-dollar corporations don’t move mission-critical infrastructure to a new management environment just because of price. For many of these customers, OpenTofu needs to clearly articulate its value proposition beyond just being an open-source alternative to Terraform.

Second, Terraform has a mature and very active ecosystem. Even though OpenTofu has built a great community base in record time, it still has significant catching up to do in terms of plugins, modules and third-party integrations.

There is no doubt that OpenTofu has established its position as the torchbearer of the open-source movement in cloud resource management. If it can sustain its rapid growth and community support, it will give both developers and organizations the ability to impact the future of infrastructure deployment and orchestration. Ultimately, the competition between OpenTofu and Terraform will only end up benefiting the broader DevOps community by empowering them to drive innovation in IaC.