Spacelift
engineering VP Wojciech Barczynski celebrated through
a blog post on Spacelift.io the availability
of the 1.9.0 release of the OpenTofu infrastructure as code (IaC) project and
the anniversary of the open source project's first stable release. Spacelift,
creator of the orchestration platform for managing the entire infrastructure
life cycle, is a major upstream supporter of OpenTofu, and Barczynski is a
member of the project's Technical Steering Committee.
"What began as a community-driven initiative to create an
open-source alternative to Terraform has become a reliable infrastructure
management tool," wrote Barczynski. "OpenTofu is backed by numerous industry
leaders and a passionate developer community, and it is also a part of the
Linux Foundation."
"By supporting OpenTofu, [Spacelift is] not only championing a
tool that complements our platform but also investing in a future where
open-source solutions drive the industry forward," he continued. "Together with
the community, we aim to make infrastructure management more accessible,
efficient and aligned with developers' needs."
New Features in the OpenTofu 1.9.0 Release
The OpenTofu 1.9.0 release, available today on GitHub, includes two significant
new features:
- `for_each` in
provider configuration blocks
One of the
biggest challenges keeping the code clean in a multi-region or multi-zone
deployment is the sheer number of providers and related configurations to be
juggled, requiring duplicated code for each region or zone. With provider
iteration, code can be iterated over a set of providers, and duplicated code is
no longer needed.
- `-exclude`
planning option
OpenTofu
already has a -target option to only plan or apply certain resources. The
-exclude flag does just the opposite - that is, include everything except a
certain resource. This was one of the highest upvoted feature requests for the
1.9.0 release.
The new release also includes bug fixes and several improvements.
You can read more about them in the release notes.
Milestones of the OpenTofu Stable Series
As it celebrates the anniversary of the first stable release, the
OpenTofu community can point to a year of milestones and the steady delivery of
useful features and fixes:
- Version 1.6, released in January 2024,
marked the first release in the stable OpenTofu v1.0 series. The release
included the OpenTofu Registry for modules and providers with a
command-line interface, the testing feature, improvements to the S3 state
backends, and many bug fixes. Most importantly, it demonstrated that the
project and community were fully operational, with a dedicated core
development team under the umbrella of the Linux Foundation and support
from the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).
- In April, version 1.7 delivered state encryption,
meaning users need not rely solely on encryption at rest. Also version 1.7
began addressing the challenges of boilerplate, declarative code with
dynamic provider-defined functions (written in, for example, Lua and
Golang) for improved code readability and reusability. This release also
offered greater configuration flexibility through dynamic provider-defined
functions and support for ‘removed' and loopable import blocks.
- Version 1.8 was released for early
evaluation in July. This release made OpenTofu code easier to
maintain, learn and read. Users can now use variables and locals in places
they were not previously supported. Test support, including mocking and
overrides, was also improved.
OpenTofu Day at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon
2024 also marked the launch
of OpenTofu Day at two international conferences - the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon
gatherings in Europe and North America. Spacelift was a Gold Sponsor of both
OpenTofu Day events, which each convened nearly 200 practitioners, experts and
enthusiasts for in-person sessions on the essential topics of IaC, the OpenTofu
release road map, and community insights and best practices. Spacelift will be
a Diamond Sponsor of OpenTofu Day on April 1, 2025, at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe
in London, England.