Should You Move To OpenTofu?

Hey folks,

Should you move to OpenTofu? I was recently asked this question on a podcast and wanted to share my thoughts here too.

I am getting this question all the time right now from clients that my team and I engage with. And the question is becoming more and more simple to answer as time goes on.

The OpenTofu project has grown a lot — it has has gained a lot of traction and is picking up steam. I believe OpenTofu if the future of TF IaC.

The project has a solid team, good funding, and they're really putting their money where their mouth is in terms of sticking to a release cadence and building new features. The team is doing well in proving out their capabilities, listening to community feedback, and showing they can keep up with (and even deliver faster) than HashiCorp’s Terraform project.

I believe that for people that are making the decision between OpenTofu and Terraform, the most important thing to consider is optionality.

Consider it from a platform engineering perspective, where your options are:

• With Terraform — your only way of automating Terraform is to write your own pipelines (side note — I highly suggest you don’t reinvent this wheel), use Atlantis, or pay for the very expensive Terraform Cloud

• With OpenTofu — you can use every tool available except Terraform Cloud

In that situation, my thinking is “hey go with the thing where you have more optionality, the choice that is actually open-source”.

OpenTofu is definitely worth looking into right now — spend some time evaluating it because the project has got legs. I believe it's worth the very simple switch and definitely worth starting your projects with.

May you always have options, Matt @ Masterpoint

PS Interested in being on a devops-focused podcast like I was? Reply to me with the topic you want to discuss and I’m happy to intro you to the right podcast.

Or, want to chat through some tricky IaC issue that you or your org are running into? Grab some time on my calendar here.