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OpenTofu is doing really well I'd say, and only picking up steam as it's going. Product roadmap-wise, the team has made some big improvements that have been re

OpenTofu is doing really well I'd say, and only picking up steam as it's going. Product roadmap-wise, the team has made some big improvements that have been requested by the community for years, with another big release coming very soon (I believe next week or the one after), here's some of the major ones: - 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. - (Coming in 1.9) - provider iteration, which 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 - (Coming in 1.9) - -exclude flag, which is the opposite of the -target flag, letting you skip planning/applying certain resources. Probably the best way to see a summary is check out the release blog posts for 1.7[0], 1.8[1], and 1.9-beta[2]. Many of those required non-trivial changes to existing parts of the codebase. One of the biggest Terraform contributors has also joined Spacelift a couple months ago to work on OpenTofu. All things considered, I'm very confident that the team will be able to handle any feature it sets their minds to, and that those improvements will keep coming. There's a ranking of top-voted issues which is probably the best way to loosely see what will be tackled next[3]. [0]: https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-7-0/ https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-7-0/ [1]: https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-8-0/ https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-8-0/ [2]: https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-9-0-beta1/ https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-9-0-beta1/ [3]: https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/issues/1496 https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/issues/1496 Disclaimer: I am involved in the OpenTofu project and was previously its tech lead.

gioazzi 2y ago
Provider iteration is a really nice one - I had a big monorepo that would deploy some baseline services in many AWS accounts, across multiple regions, generating tf.json files for each provider to match all accounts that were created. However, what really broke this model at some point was the fact that we were running so many providers instances that our Terraform Cloud would go out of memory! Since each provider instance in tf is really launching a new process it really adds up... At some point I was thinking since the engine and the providers use gRPC to communicate, it MAY be possible to distribute providers across machines, but I never investigated it further... I'm pretty sure there was a notice in the tf plugin SDK stating that it was not possible to connect them over a network... but why not? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- cube2222 2y ago
  Yeah, esp. the AWS provider is pretty memory-intensive. I believe someone on the team did some investigation into this (running providers remotely) but it's not really a priority (if it is for you, feel free to voice that on the issue tracker!). Frankly though, with pricing for cloud instances being generally linear wrt to the CPU/memory size of the instance, I don't think there's much reason to prefer many smaller machines over just using a larger single one and avoiding all this added complexity.

gioazzi 2y ago

Provider iteration is a really nice one - I had a big monorepo that would deploy some baseline services in many AWS accounts, across multiple regions, generating tf.json files for each provider to match all accounts that were created. However, what really broke this model at some point was the fact that we were running so many providers instances that our Terraform Cloud would go out of memory! Since each provider instance in tf is really launching a new process it really adds up... At some point I was thinking since the engine and the providers use gRPC to communicate, it MAY be possible to distribute providers across machines, but I never investigated it further... I'm pretty sure there was a notice in the tf plugin SDK stating that it was not possible to connect them over a network... but why not? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

cube2222 2y ago
Yeah, esp. the AWS provider is pretty memory-intensive. I believe someone on the team did some investigation into this (running providers remotely) but it's not really a priority (if it is for you, feel free to voice that on the issue tracker!). Frankly though, with pricing for cloud instances being generally linear wrt to the CPU/memory size of the instance, I don't think there's much reason to prefer many smaller machines over just using a larger single one and avoiding all this added complexity.