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Few expected when Hashicorp dumped Terraform’s open source license for the Business Source License, it would lead to a fork, OpenTofu. Or that the fork would turn out to be so successful. Yet, here we are a year after the first OpenTofu release and while Terraform is still the top Infrastructure as Code (IaC) program, OpenTofu is gaining ground rapidly.
According to OpenTofu, registry requests have tripled to over 6 million daily requests in the last three months. This, I might add, was before OpenTofu 1.9 was released.
This latest release introduces several long-awaited features that promise to enhance the efficiency and flexibility of infrastructure management for developers and DevOps teams while increasing its popularity.
This new version’s standout feature is the introduction of provider iteration using `for_each` in provider configuration blocks. This functionality allows users to create multiple dynamically chosen instances of provider configurations, significantly simplifying multiregion or multizone deployments. For example:
provider "aws" {
alias = "by_region"
for_each = var.aws_regions
region = each.key
}
This feature reduces code duplication and makes managing infrastructure across multiple regions or zones easier.
In addition, the -exclude planning option is the flip side of the existing -target option, and -exclude allows operators to specify resources to be excluded from planning or applying, providing greater control over the scope of infrastructure changes.
As envO, an IaC company, put it in a blog post, “Before this feature was introduced, excluding a resource or module required manually targeting every other resource, which was tedious and prone to errors. Now, with the -exclude flag, you can focus your deployments while skipping resources or modules effortlessly with a more efficient, DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself) approach.”
Together, these new command options make managing OpenTofu instances much easier across multiple clouds or regions.
In the meantime, HashiCorp has a different approach called Stacks to address multiple-cloud and region deployments. Stacks, however, is still in beta.
Spacelift, a major OpenTofu contributor, celebrates the project’s one-year anniversary alongside the 1.9.0 release. In a recent blog post, Wojciech Barczynski, Spacelift’s vice president of engineering and a member of OpenTofu’s Technical Steering Committee, highlighted the project’s journey. Barczynski wrote, “What began as a community-driven initiative to create an open source alternative to Terraform has become a reliable infrastructure management tool.”
Barczynski added, “By supporting OpenTofu, [Spacelift is] not only championing a tool that complements our platform but also investing in a future where open source solutions drive the industry forward. Together with the community, we aim to make infrastructure management more accessible, efficient, and aligned with developers’ needs.”
OpenTofu’s development owes a lot to Spacelift. The company has dedicated full-time engineers to the project and recently added Martin Atkins to their OpenTofu team. Atkins, a prolific open source contributor, joins Christian Mesh and James Humphries as leading upstream contributors.
In the meantime, OpenTofu is receiving support from other developer companies. With its 2024.3 release, JetBrains announced support for OpenTofu. The integration switches to OpenTofu when it detects a .tofu file in a project and provides OpenTofu-specific code completion. The OpenTofu team has also started working with the community on a possible port of the VS Code extension for OpenTofu.
Looking ahead, the OpenTofu community is already planning for future releases. With the implementation of provider iteration, attention is now turning to other highly requested features. A working prototype for the Open Container Initiative (OCI) provider registry is in development, and the community is seeking input on related Request for Comments (RFC)s.
As OpenTofu continues to evolve, it remains committed to providing an open source alternative for infrastructure management backed by industry leaders and a passionate developer community. The project’s rapid growth and consistent delivery of new features demonstrate its potential to shape IaC’s. HashiCorp has reason to up its game. OpenTofu is proving to be real competition.
