opentofu VS go-cloud

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.

Even when going multi-cloud you can employ different strategies. Vault is definitely one of them, but you can also use federation to exchange one cloud's credentials for another's, giving you the ability to centralize secrets in one of them. You can use a layer of abstraction like GoCloud [0]. You can also build for each cloud separately and decide either not to centralize secrets at all, or build some trivial bespoke tooling to synchronize some of them. I'm not endorsing any of the options, just pointing out that Vault isn't the only one.

https://github.com/google/go-cloud

> If Google started adding Google Cloud specific primitives natively to Go would you call that forward thinking as well?

Go actually ships with a quite forward thinking SQL interface. It's an abstract interface over a DB, and you just import the "driver" that powers it. The driver conforms to a standard interface, so all of them behave roughly the same.

I think this is what everyone wants from Deno/etc - why can't there also be a KV interface that's universal, or a Queue interface that's universal?

People attempted this w/ go [1], where it attempts to use the same nice experience of the SQL logic, but it never seemed to gain traction.

https://gocloud.dev

github.com/google/go-cloud/pubsub package provides a set of interfaces and tools to work with publish/subscribe messaging. This package allows easy communication between independent components by decoupling the sender and the receiver.

I'm guessing this is a reasonable example of what they're using it for? server.go

https://github.com/google/go-cloud probably out of context, but not IaC but agnostic backend development with Go across multiple clouds

The plan is to have a process for generating AWS CDK targeting Lambda (pluggable providers, but start with AWS CDK, because it's what I use), and to use the Google Cloud Development Kit (also called CDK, but not the same) https://github.com/google/go-cloud to abstract the services.

In this post, I will talk about an exciting project maintained by the team that develops the Go language: the Go Cloud Development Kit, also known as the Go CDK.

The API of gocloud.dev, is stable. We are at ariga.io, already use gocloud.dev for internal service, and even in the public for easy adopt multi-clouds provider: https://github.com/ariga/atlas/commit/ef0b0eae65a61375482497ceb9ed9790a469b56e

On Go, which has a community focused on the cloud, there is even GoCloud, a library with a single, common, and high-level API that allows an application to support any of those clouds and even on-premise alternatives for those services. All can be configurable at deploy time by the infrastructure team.