opentofu
OpenTofu
Overview
OpenTofu is an open-source infrastructure as code tool that uses HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) to declaratively manage cloud infrastructure. It is a community-driven fork of Terraform, fully compatible with existing Terraform providers and modules, with exclusive features like native state encryption. Pulumi provides an alternative IaC approach using general-purpose languages (TypeScript, Python, Go) instead of HCL.
When to use: Managing cloud infrastructure declaratively, provisioning multi-cloud resources, enforcing infrastructure consistency across environments, encrypting state at rest (OpenTofu), using familiar programming languages for IaC (Pulumi).
When NOT to use: One-off scripts better suited to CLI tools, application-level configuration management (use Ansible/Chef), container orchestration logic (use Kubernetes manifests), simple static hosting (use platform-native tools).