OpenTofu, a fork of the popular Terraform infrastructure automation platform, today moved into general availability.

The milestone follows a four-month development effort that involved more than 60 engineers. According to the project’s organizers, OpenTofu is also backed by over 150 companies including several venture-backed enterprise software startups. The platform’s launch into general availability means that it’s now suitable for use in production environments.

“This OpenTofu GA release is the culmination of 4 months of worldwide community efforts across 5 continents, from hundreds of contributors and over five dozen developers,” said Sebastian Stadil, a core OpenTofu contributor and chief executive of Scalr Inc., a startup that provides infrastructure management software. “Now that we have a stable release out, the community can look forward to a quick succession of long awaited features and enhancements.”

OpenTofu is a new version of Terraform, a popular open-source project created by HashiCorp Inc. Software teams at more than 60,000 companies use Terraform to provision cloud infrastructure. The platform makes it possible to create scripts that can automatically set up virtual machines and other cloud resources, thereby removing the need for developers to individually configure each asset.

Terraform also lends itself to other tasks. The platform can automatically fix certain configuration issues, such as cases when a virtual machine’s settings change in a way that makes it less secure or more expensive to run. Terraform also simplifies the task of managing encryption keys and other application secrets. 

Work on OpenTofu began last August after HashiCorp, Terraform’s developer, changed the latter project’s license. Under the new license, end-users can access the platform’s source code and use it at no charge as before. However, software makers are prohibited from using Terraform to build competing products.

OpenTofu is a copy of Terraform’s source code, or fork, with a more permissive license. There are no restrictions on the manner in which software makers may incorporate the project into commercial products. The development of OpenTofu is overseen by the Linux Foundation.

Thanks to their largely identical code bases, OpenTofu is compatible with Terraform. That means a company using Terraform can switch to the former project without making major code changes to its cloud environment. But on the OpenTofu website, the platform’s developers note that the code differences between the two projects are likely to grow over time, which could make switching between them more difficult for users.

OpenTofu community has already built a number of features not available in Terraform. The version that became generally available today, OpenTofu 1.6, includes “hundreds” of enhancements including bug fixes and performance improvements. 

One of the release’s main highlights is a service designed to replace the Terraform Registry. The latter tool is a kind of app store through which users can share infrastructure management scripts and related code components. According to OpenTofu’s developers, the Terraform Registry substitute they’ve developed is faster and costs significantly less to operate. 

The next version of OpenTofu is set to introduce even more significant upgrades. The project’s developers are working on a plugin system that will make it easier for users to extend the core open-source code with custom features. Additionally, OpenTofu is set to receive a new encryption capability that should help improve the security of customer deployments. 

Image: Linux Foundation