What is a good open platform for the tech business? My corp want to go full Teams, which sucks even more than Slack. At least most tooling has a Slack integration of some sort.

In my experience with AWS, you run into issues using terraform that CDK just doesn’t have. I’d rather have a different reliable system for each cloud environment than one system that is suboptimal for each environment. Since the providers are different, you don’t really have anything in common besides using HCL as the language anyway.

it is agnostic of cloud providers: you can use it to deploy infrastructure to multiple providers

Nicely put. I frequently see the first part of this sentence and not the second. (Maybe I only pay attention to the first part and then disappoint myself…)

Terraform/Tofu allow me to use the same basic syntax and to have one project that controls AWS/GCP/K8s/my home servers, but I cannot use it to describe “a running server process” and just deploy that on any of those places. Instead I’d need to have like aws_beanstalk_service { ... } and gcp_application { ... } and kubernetes_manifest { ... } and systemd_service { ... } and the contents of those blocks would be totally different (and I’d need a bunch of different ancillary blocks for each of those).

Thanks for the detailed comment!

It’s for far more than just deploying VMs: you can create pretty much anything you can on a cloud provider, such as databases, network rules, access tokens, object storage, etc.

nothing about it is common or portable, so if you change your VM host, it might all fall apart.

Disclaimer, I’m pretty much elbow deep into terraform daily and have written/contributed to a few providers.

A lot of this is highly dependent upon the providers (the thing that allows the Terraform engine to interface with APIs for AWS, Proxmox, vSphere, etc. The Telmate Proxmox provider in particular is/was quite awful with not realizing a provisioned VM had moved to a new host.

Also, the default/tutorial code tends to be not very flexible. The game changer for me was using the built-in functions for decoding yaml from a config file (like yamldecode(file(config.yml)) in a locals block. You can then specify your desired infrastructure with yaml and (if you write your Terraform code correctly) you can blowout hundreds of VMs, policies, firewall rules, dns records etc with a single manifest. I’ve also used the local_file resource with a Terraform file template to dynamically create an Ansible inventory file based on what’s deployed.

This is absurdly wrong. To anyone reading this comment there, ignore this guy.

Like an .ini file.

First of all thank you for your thoughtful response. I do disagree on a few key points though:

The terms of the MPL and BSL are incompatible, insofar that Hashicorp cannot unilaterally relicense MPL code from OpenTofu into BSL code in Terraform. But Hashicorp could still use/incorporate OpenTofu MPL code into Terraform, provided that they honor the rest of the obligations of the MPL.

When you can still use code from a license and distribute the end result under a different license, that means they are compatible. Just like the MIT is compatible with any other license.

if OpenTofu starts to gain new features that Terrarform doesn’t have, Hashicorp can incorporate those features but they won’t be unique.

So they are benefiting from improvements made in OpenTofu.

Why would a paying customer give money to Hashicorp for something that OpenTofu provides for free?

To access the features that are exclusive to Terraform. Companies spend unglodly amounts of money to pay for MS Sharepoint (completely different product, just giving an example of an expensive product with competitive groupware options in the market). Why wouldn’t they pay for Terraform, especially if it included a support contract? I think you are severely underestimating the willingness of customers to pay for service if you don’t think that would happen.

And all features henceforth developed for Terraform would be exclusive to it, while all features developed for OpenTofu would be available to Terraform because the MPL is such a pushover license that doing so is trivial. OpenTofu will always stay behind in this scheme. In other words, any developer contributing to OpenTofu is donating work to IBM. I bet they are more than okay with that.

Had they moved new OpenTofu contributions to a strong copyleft license, OpenTofu would lose nothing, while Hashicorp/IBM would lose the freeloading of FOSS developer’s contributions. IBM still has an out in this scenario, which is offering services to paying customers, just like Hashicorp did before the licensing fiasco. It’s a lucrative business model, and one they are good at.