It's Time to Switch to OpenTofu
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It's Time to Switch to OpenTofu
1–10 of 27 posts
Re: It's Time to Switch to OpenTofu
#2OpenTofu is now more secure (state encryption), maintainable (early variable evaluation), and powerful (provider iteration) than Terraform. This is the advantage of being truly open source, foundation-managed, and community-driven.
Now is a good time to make the switch!
Re: It's Time to Switch to OpenTofu
#3Or use code instead of HCL.
I joined Pulumi because I believe that using the abstraction and tooling that a proper language allows is the way to go, but anything that's not config: CDK, Bicep, TF CDK, etc – is to me a step in the right direction.
It's not that HCL is bad, and I get that it's dominant. It's just the same complaint I have with yaml and yaml templating: You will want something more than a config file at some point. Start today.
Re: It's Time to Switch to OpenTofu
#4Or use code instead of HCL. I joined Pulumi because I believe that using the abstraction and tooling that a proper language allows is the way to go, but anything that's not config: CDK, Bicep, TF CDK, etc – is to me a step in the right direction. It's not that HCL is bad, and I get that it's dominant. It's just the same complaint I have with yaml and yaml templating: You will want something more than a config file at…
What is HCL?
Comparing to yalm and such, I'm assuming it is using a templating tool that presents a "not programming" front? If so, I think I'm 100% in agreement.
It is complicated, I think, because declarative is nice. But the idea that you have to forego all execution to get declarative code is frustrating, in the extreme.
Re: It's Time to Switch to OpenTofu
#5[deleted]
Re: It's Time to Switch to OpenTofu
#6I've been waiting for https://github.com/opentofu/registry/pull/824 ("Revert commit that removed Russian providers") to be resolved, but it seems to have stalled.
Open source does not work as I envisioned, I guess.
Re: It's Time to Switch to OpenTofu
#7Or use code instead of HCL. I joined Pulumi because I believe that using the abstraction and tooling that a proper language allows is the way to go, but anything that's not config: CDK, Bicep, TF CDK, etc – is to me a step in the right direction. It's not that HCL is bad, and I get that it's dominant. It's just the same complaint I have with yaml and yaml templating: You will want something more than a config file at…
Yeah this was one of the things about terraform that I never liked. After spending all day writing my imperative code, I’m going to write some declarative JSON to deploy it? Why?
There’s a good discussion here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42663231
Re: It's Time to Switch to OpenTofu
#8Just to include this in the discussion, here's some major features that have been added over the last year (but there's a huge amount of small ones too):
- End-to-End State Encryption - lets you encrypt your state-file end-to-end, either with a key management system like AWS KMS, or static keys.
- Early Evaluation - the ability to parameterize initialiation-time values, like module versions and sources, backend configuration parameters, etc. and keep them DRY.
- Provider Iteration - lets you use for_each with providers, e.g. create one provider per region, something that currently requires a bunch of copy-paste, or tools like Terragrunt
- -exclude flag - the opposite of the -target flag, letting you skip planning/applying certain resources.
Probably the best way to see a summary is to check out the release blog posts for 1.7[0], 1.8[1], and 1.9[2], as well as TFA itself. If you'd like to learn more, I recommend taking a look at the related docs, too.
[0]: https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-7-0/
[1]: https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-8-0/
[2]: https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-9-0/
Disclaimer: involved in opentofu
Re: It's Time to Switch to OpenTofu
#9Or use code instead of HCL. I joined Pulumi because I believe that using the abstraction and tooling that a proper language allows is the way to go, but anything that's not config: CDK, Bicep, TF CDK, etc – is to me a step in the right direction. It's not that HCL is bad, and I get that it's dominant. It's just the same complaint I have with yaml and yaml templating: You will want something more than a config file at…
What is HCL? Comparing to yalm and such, I'm assuming it is using a templating tool that presents a "not programming" front? If so, I think I'm 100% in agreement. It is complicated, I think, because declarative is nice. But the idea that you have to forego all execution to get declarative code is frustrating, in the extreme.
> What is HCL?
It's that weird declarative language used in terraform configuration files
Re: It's Time to Switch to OpenTofu
#10Or use code instead of HCL. I joined Pulumi because I believe that using the abstraction and tooling that a proper language allows is the way to go, but anything that's not config: CDK, Bicep, TF CDK, etc – is to me a step in the right direction. It's not that HCL is bad, and I get that it's dominant. It's just the same complaint I have with yaml and yaml templating: You will want something more than a config file at…
I’ve come to appreciate power-limited DSLs. The problem is, they are very tricky to design: too simple and users will start templating, or even worse: programming in them (e.g. Yaml+Sh); too powerful and you’ve got yourself another full programming language (e.g. Dhall). I found HCL, although frequently complaining its type system is clearly designed by Go people, to be pretty close to the sweet spot. For each if-loop and other horrid workarounds I’ve had to write, someone else did not write a tower of abstractions that when interpreted, yielded the right result. Maintenance is usually an architectural task, rather than computer science. There are no frameworks to learn, there is no flashy new package manager attached, there is no need to deal with Python pacakge management and such. And, since it’s usually good enough, the effort to add this is disproportionately large, so that nobody does it.
Coming from my Haskell background, I’ll say it like Gabriella Gonzalez once put it [1]: _worst practices should be hard_, and this is where and why I think Terraform/Tofu shine and succeeded.
[1]: https://www.haskellforall.com/2016/04/worst-practices-should...