Infrastructure from Code: The Death of Traditional IaC?

Every couple of years, someone declares that Terraform is dead. The replacement changes — Pulumi, CDK, now “Infrastructure from Code” — but the thesis stays the same: writing infrastructure definitions separately from application code is busywork, and a sufficiently smart tool should just infer the infrastructure from the code itself.

It’s a compelling idea. It’s also mostly wrong, at least in 2024.

I’ve spent the past few months evaluating IfC tools for DreamFlare, and the landscape tells an interesting story about what happens when elegant abstractions meet production reality.

OpenTofu: The Community Fork of Infrastructure-as-Code

Back in August, I wrote about HashiCorp’s decision to switch Terraform from MPL v2.0 to the Business Source License. I said I was watching the fallout.

Three months later, the fallout has a name: OpenTofu — which arrived faster than anyone expected.

It also has a Linux Foundation home, 140+ organizational backers, 600+ individual pledges, 18 full-time developers, and a beta release that dropped just days ago. The community response moved fast — even by open-source drama standards.