04 / Software▸Review▸Infra
Full review — three-week desk testHashiCorp BSL changed the politics; the provider ecosystem still decides the defaults. We planned, applied, and refactored real cloud + homelab modules — and kept OpenTofu in the conversation.
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Terraform taught a generation to describe cloud resources in HCL and apply them like code. Then HashiCorp moved to BSL, OpenTofu forked under MPL, and every team had a licensing conversation layered on top of their state-file anxiety.
We still write HCL daily. The review question in 2026 is not "does Terraform work" — it does — but whether your org standardizes on HashiCorp's CLI/HCP or the OpenTofu track while keeping provider habits intact.
Planned and applied modules for a small AWS footprint (VPC, S3, IAM) plus a homelab Proxmox/cloud-init style lab using community providers; remote state in S3; compared workflow notes with OpenTofu on the same configs.
terraform { required_version = ">= 1.11.0" backend "s3" { bucket = "example-tf-state" key = "benchlog/network.tfstate" region = "us-east-1" }}
resource "aws_s3_bucket" "logs" { bucket = "benchlog-logs-example"}Provider gravity. If a cloud API exists, there is probably a Terraform provider — still the densest ecosystem in IaC.
Plan/apply discipline. A good plan output is a change-management ritual that Ansible ad-hoc never matched.
Module culture. Public modules + internal modules scale team practices when you enforce version pins.
PullHCL is the skill. Terraform vs OpenTofu is the distribution decision.
| Annoyance | Severity | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| State file foot-guns | High | Remote state + lock + backup |
| License politics (BSL vs MPL) | High for some orgs | Decide deliberately |
| HCL sprawl without modules | Medium | Lint + structure early |
| Drift outside Terraform | Medium | Import or stop click-ops |
| If you… | Verdict |
|---|---|
| Need multi-cloud resource provisioning | Terraform/OpenTofu yes |
| Only manage 3 VMs with Compose | Maybe overkill |
| Require OSI license purity | Prefer OpenTofu |
| Want HashiCorp support/HCP governance | Terraform + HCP path |
Score bars map to lived questions: features you actually used, day-to-day snappiness, threat-model honesty, price vs capability, ecosystem coverage, and how long until the tool felt invisible.
We still recommend learning Terraform syntax first. Which binary you run in CI is a policy choice — make it on purpose, not by habit.
Honesty requires alternatives. Depending on how your brain is shaped, one of these may be the right call instead.
The terminal UI that makes kubectl feel like a video game — once you live here, you don't go back.
Dashboards that still look a bit 2018 — and still the first thing you install on a new cluster.