Technology @lemmy.ml narwhal @lemmy.ml 1 yr. ago

Why should I care about OpenTofu?

opentofu.org Why should I care about OpenTofu? | OpenTofu

TL;DR having options is good strategy, OpenTofu is your insurance policy and competition makes things great.

34 comments

Idk if its just me but these sort of frameworks seem the make it intentionally hard to figure out wtf they are for.

What is OpenTofu? OpenTofu is a Terraform fork, created as an initiative of Gruntwork, Spacelift, Harness, Env0, Scalr, and others, in response to HashiCorp’s switch from an open-source license to the BUSL

None of these names mean anything to me.

The entire FAQ doesn't spend a syllable saying what it is for, except that its like Terraform. Which is a bad name to google.

After searching around, it seems to be some vaugely defined devops/cloud management thing.
- I understand the concern but I think you're just not really in the target demographic for the project. Terraform is a very well known infrastructure-as-code tool, and the other companies listed are suppliers of commercial products that build on top of what Terraform provides.
  
  But i wouldn't know i guess.
  
  Thats what irks me. Say some smaller project is taking off and needs a better scaling environment. I will not find out about any of this open source alternative, ever.
- The entire FAQ doesn't spend a syllable saying what it is for, except that its like Terraform.
  
  It seems to be some sort of trend to absolutely never explain what your product is or how it works. Especially not on the main page. It's just "click here to sign up now"!
- You can define your whole cloud infra as code so you don't have to manually maintain hundreds, sometimes thousands of resources manually. My work would be basically impossible without it, or the DevOps team shouldn't consist of 5 peope but 20. It's a descriptive language where you define the end result you want to see and Terraform transforms your code to actual API calls to AWS/GCP/Azure. Like this
  
  resource database MyAwesomeDB {
  engine = mssql
  version = 1.1
  backup, initial db, master pw etcetc. }
  
  It's incredible useful where you have 50+ microservices, 10+ db instances, load balancers, gateways, auto scaling rules, object storage, nosql, queues, countless firewall and routing rules, notifications and observability systems. And that was just dev. Then you have test, staging, prod, plus multi-region on top of that. And of course ephemeral environments fired up for every PR so the dev can test their shit without messing everything up. You end up easily managing a couple of thousands of cloud resources.
  
  holy shit I'm so glad I got out of I.T.
  What the fuck is any of that
  
  Thanks for the summary! I figured that out after several steps of googling. It's kinda nuts that they wouldn't want to put any of that on their page though. Even terraform isn't very clear about it.
  
  Hope they end up doing that if they slowly diverge from the original tool
- When she got that BUSL 🥵🥵🥵
- What is MellowMax? MellowMax is a MetroMeld fork created as an initiative of Bligewater, Bartender, PillPopper, b1tchsnack and others in response to TurboCo's switch from an open source licence to the PMSL.
  
  Good thing you can just invert the polarity to jumble the neutron matrix without interfering with the crombulation field.
- I used to have a career in software development and I've never heard of any of these projects.
  
  I generally took the view though that if I didn't understand what an earth a program was even for, I probably didn't need to worry about it and could ignore it.
- Yeah this is just not for you. In the DevOps/SRE space, EVERYONE knows terraform and most of those names will be recognizable to the people most deeply involved in using/managing terraform.
  
  There’s plenty of things that turned out to be useful to me in spite of my not recognizing their names or taglines when I first encountered them—so I don’t just assume that anything I’m not already familiar with isn’t “for” me. A brief explanation for non-insiders (or even a mention of what field it’s relevant to) would have been helpful in establishing that.
  
  Is that the crowd you want to address people on your frontpage?
- It's mostly about infrastructure as code but I have never used it.
The open source infrastructure as code tool. Previously named OpenTF, OpenTofu is a fork of Terraform that is open-source, community-driven, and managed by the Linux Foundation.
Man I hate that name. I love terraform and will probably love the open source version of it even more but yuck. Hahaha. Bikeshedding moment, sorry.
- It's probably really hard to find something that shares the "tf" part, but isn't too close to the original name.
  
  Why does it need to share the "tf" part? Just say it's compatible with terraform files as of some version, and optionally make your own format that's separate from the Terraform format so you're not limited by their design decisions.
You can define your whole cloud infra as code so you don't have to manually maintain hundreds, sometimes thousands of resources manually. My work would be basically impossible without it, or the DevOps team shouldn't consist of 5 peope but 20. It's a descriptive language where you define the end result you want to see and Terraform transforms your code to actual API calls to AWS/GCP/Azure. Like this

resource database MyAwesomeDB {
engine = mssql
version = 1.1
backup, initial db, master pw etcetc
}

It's incredible useful where you have 50+ microservices, 10+ db instances, load balancers, gateways, auto scaling rules, object storage, nosql, queues, countless firewall and routing rules, notifications and observability systems. And that was just dev. Then you have test, staging, prod, plus multi-region on top of that. And of course ephemeral environments fired up for every PR so the dev can test their shit without messing everything up. You end up easily managing a couple of thousands of cloud resources.

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