opentofu VS atlantis

and more.

Hey!

> With OpenTofu exclusive features making such an early debut, is the intention to remain a superset of upstream Terraform functionality and spec, or allow OpenTofu to diverge and move in its own direction?

The intention is to let it diverge. There will surely be some amount of shared new features, but we're generally going our own way.

> Will you aim to stick to compatibility with Terraform providers/modules?

Yes.

Regarding providers, we might introduce some kind of superset protocol for providers at some point, for tofu-exclusive functionality, but we'll make sure to design it in a way where providers keep working with both Terraform and OpenTofu.

Regarding modules, this one will be more tricky, as there might Terraform languages features that aren't supported in OpenTofu and vice-versa. We have a proposal[0] to tackle this, and enable module authors to easily create modules with support for both, even when using some exclusive features of any one of them.

> Is the potential impact of community fragmentation on your mind as many commercial users who don’t care about open source ideology stick to the tried-and-true Hashicorp Terraform?

We've talked to a lot of people, and we've met many who see the license changes as a risk for them, while OpenTofu, with its open-source nature, is the less-risky choice. That includes large enterprises.

> Is there any intention to try and supplement the tooling around the core product to provide an answer to features like Terraform Cloud dashboard, sentinel policies and other things companies may want out of the product outside of the command line tool itself?

That's mostly covered by the companies sponsoring OpenTofu's development: Spacelift (I work here), env0, Scalr, Harness, Gruntworks.

[0]: https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/issues/1328

Please remember to file in a calm and orderly fashion toward the exits and remember: IBM killed Centos for profit.

Terraform users can pick up their new alternative here:

https://opentofu.org/

and for those of you with Vault, you can find your new alternative here:

https://openbao.org/

OpenTofu v1.6

Note: New versions of Terraform will be placed under the BUSL license, but everything created before version 1.5.x stays open-source. OpenTofu is an open-source version of Terraform that will expand on Terraform's existing concepts and offerings. It is a viable alternative to HashiCorp's Terraform, being forked from Terraform version 1.5.6. OpenTofu retained all the features and functionalities that had made Terraform popular among developers while also introducing improvements and enhancements. OpenTofu is not going to have its own providers and modules, but it is going to use its own registry for them.

opentofu is solving this with proper state encryption support: https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/issues/874

As with all other Linux Foundation and CNCF projects, OpenTofu is guided by the Technical Steering Committee(TSC), which works in open collaboration with the community on the development of new features, upgrades, bug fixes, etc. The current TSC consists of representatives from Harness, Spacelift, Scalr, Gruntworks, and env0.

None of these are a replacement of Terraform Cloud (recently rebranded to HCP Terraform). For example, when you create a PR, it could affect multiple workspaces. The new experimental version of TFC/TFE (I refuse to call it HCP!) implements Stacks, which is something like a workflow, and links one workspace output to other workspace inputs. None of the open-source solutions, including the paid Digger [0], support this - only the paid one, such as Spacelift [1] (which is the closest to TFC if you ask me). Having a monorepo of Terraform is a common design pattern, so, if I change an embedded module, it could trigger changes it many workspaces. As far as I know, Atlantis [2] can't really help in this case.

By the way, the reason I singled-out Spacelift is due to its quality, and the great Terraform provider it has. Scalr [3], for example, has a really low-quality Terraform provider. I extensively use the hashicorp/tfe provider to manage TFC itself.

[0]: https://digger.dev/

[1]: https://spacelift.io/

[2]: https://www.runatlantis.io/

[3]: https://www.scalr.com/

Atlantis is a pull request automation tool that works well with plain Terraform right away. But what if we're already using Terramate to generate Terraform code?

Atlantis automates reviewing and deploying Terraform via pull requests, streamlining collaboration and ensuring consistency across Terraform deployments.

For example, Atlantisgo for Terraform, Zapier’s Kubechecks for Argo CD, Quizlet’s GitHub action all do something similar to this. But a generic, extensible tool for IaC providers doesn’t seem to exist. Additionally, many of them require exposing your Kubernetes cluster or other infrastructure to third-party access, webhooks, etc.

Our first attempt was to introduce other engineering teams to Terraform - the Platform team was already using it extensively with Terragrunt, and using Atlantis to automate plan and apply operations in a Git flow to ensure infrastructure was consistent. We'd written modules, with documentation, and an engineer would simply need to raise a PR to use the module and provide the right values, and Atlantis (once the PR was approved by Platform) would go ahead and set it up for them.

Alternatively, you can look at solutions like Atlantis or spacelift.

Atlantis: https://www.runatlantis.io/

Looking at the commits at https://github.com/runatlantis/atlantis, it looks like 1.6.5. Am I right?

We use Atlantis [0] for CI/CD automation of Terraform pull requests to a centralized repository. It's pretty good too, especially for a self-hosted solution. I can't see how Terraform Cloud's costs would be justifiable for us without a custom contract.

[0] https://www.runatlantis.io/