A Tale of Two Tools

Until 2023, Terraform was the undisputed king of IaC. However, a change in licensing led to the creation of OpenTofu, an open-source fork of Terraform managed by the Linux Foundation.

Similarities:

• Both use HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language).
• Both use the same providers (AWS, Azure, GCP).
• Both manage 'state'.

Differences:

• Licensing: OpenTofu is strictly open-source (MPL), while Terraform is Business Source License (BSL).
• Governance: OpenTofu is community-driven.

In this course, we use them interchangeably. The commands are identical (terraform plan vs tofu plan). We will focus on the logic that applies to both.