OpenTofu Announces General Availability

OpenTofu – the open source fork of Terraform™ – is ready for production use with the launch of its first stable release.

SAN FRANCISCO – JANUARY 10, 2024 – The OpenTofu community is excited to announce the general availability of OpenTofu, the open source fork of Terraform™, now a production-ready project under the Linux Foundation. This milestone follows four months of development from over five dozen developers, offering a straightforward migration path for Terraform users.

The journey to this release highlights OpenTofu’s community-driven approach, and the value of open source. Two examples of this stand out:

• An RFC for client-side state encryption was submitted by a community member that tried to bring it to Terraform since 2016
• Multiple RFCs for the OpenTofu registry were submitted, leading to an architecture that is 10x faster and 10x cheaper to operate.
  
  

There are many features in OpenTofu 1.6 to look forward to, including:

• An advanced testing feature for improved stability in configurations and modules.
• Enhanced S3 state backend with new authentication methods, maintaining compatibility with S3-compatible storage.
• A new provider and module registry, offering a streamlined process for publishing via a simple pull request.
• Hundreds of performance enhancements, bug fixes, and other improvements.
  
  

The OpenTofu community continues to grow, with dozens of developers contributing, hundreds of active community members, thousands of Github followers, and tens of thousands of fans. The project is also supported by many corporate backers and technology partners, including CloudFlare, BuildKite, GitLab, and Oracle.

While the 1.6 release had the dual objectives of being released as early as possible, and as stable as possible, the upcoming OpenTofu 1.7 will introduce many more community requested features that are not available in Terraform, including & under consideration:

• Client-side state encryption, developed through community collaboration, and well suited for heightened security in regulated environments.
• Parameterizable backends, providers, and modules to enable more readable, DRY code.
• Third-party extensibility, with a plugin system for new state backends
  
  

With today’s release, OpenTofu is ready for production use. To learn more about OpenTofu, including how to get involved, contribute, and access their repository, please visit the OpenTofu website and GitHub.

Supporting quotes

"Even in these early days, I am consistently impressed with the enthusiasm and dedication of the community," said Christian Mesh, Core Team at OpenTofu. "I enjoy going to work every day to enable and support them."

"Today marks a significant milestone for the OpenTofu project with the announcement of its GA release, culminating a period of rapid development that transformed OpenTofu from a Terraform fork into a celebrated Linux Foundation project," said David Bejar, Head of Software Engineering Allianz. "The progression marked by the brisk pace of its beta releases and release candidate highlights the robust community support behind this project. These positive developments had further solidified Allianz's commitment to OpenTofu. The GA release is a significant achievement for OpenTofu, something to celebrate by the open source community and a clear indicator of Allianz's pioneering role in technological innovation and collaborative development."

"I’m very pumped to get this into the community’s hands," said Kuba Martin, Interim Technical Lead of OpenTofu, Engineering Manager at Spacelift. "I believe it’s important for bedrock tooling like this to be open-source, with the ecosystem being able to build around it. It took us a while to get OpenTofu to the current, stable state, but now people can actually start moving their workloads to it. With this foundation in place, I can’t wait to show people what we’ll build next!” 

“We are thrilled to see OpenTofu making its first stable release after only a few short months since its launch," said Chris Aniszczyk, CTO of CNCF. " This is testament to the innovation that happens when you have cross-organization cooperation under a foundation with open governance. We look forward to the continued growth and evolution of the OpenTofu community."

"It's inspiring to see how the community has joined forces to keep Terraform open source at such an amazing pace," said Dotan Horovits, CNCF Ambassador. "I believe that taking the foundational path under the Linux Foundation will give OpenTofu better guardrails for its sustainability and continued joint innovation."

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Media Contact

Noah Lehman

The Linux Foundation

nlehman@linuxfoundation.org