OpenTofu Day at KubeCon NA Salt Lake City: The Recap

A near-overflow crowd of almost 200 people converged on the Salt Palace Convention Center in Salt Lake City on Tuesday for the second-ever OpenTofu Day. The event was part of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America. 

OpenTofu Day is an opportunity for the infrastructure-as-code (IaC) community to convene practitioners, experts, and enthusiasts for in-person sessions on the essential topics of IaC, the plans for future OpenTofu releases, novel ideas, and projects built on top of OpenTofu. 

Presentations at the event, including sessions from AWS, Cisco, and Fidelity Investments, centered on two key themes: a growing community of contributors, and a growing diversity of at-scale deployments.

Community growth

Source

Sebastian Stadil, Program Chair, shared the above graph showing the accelerating growth of OpenTofu weekly downloads in 2024, the project’s first full year. He also shared that OpenTofu has earned 23,000 stars on GitHub. Quite impressive!

My presentation, entitled Mutually Assured Development, was focused on the objectives we have as a community to grow the OpenTofu ecosystem, improve transparency, and make practitioners really feel that this is “their project” – because it is! Education about what it means to be open source is important for new projects such as OpenTofu, and I tried to impress on the audience that the code belongs to the community, not to a single company that could decide to change the license down the road. In fact, OpenTofu was started by several competing companies that banded together to create and contribute to a truly community-driven open-source project. OpenTofu is and will always remain open source under the Linux Foundation.   

Several great sessions from a range of companies highlighted the great success OpenTofu has experienced in just its first year of existence.

The AWS talk, Accelerating Application Delivery with OpenTofu Controller and GitOps, by  Lucas Duarte and Tiago Reichert, was about the role platform teams play in supporting developers, striving to find the balance between standardization and autonomy. AWS does not contribute directly to the project, but it wants to support the customers who are using it. The company has created OpenTofu modules that act like a blueprint to empower developers while maintaining standards and consistency.

Jordan Argueta and Douglas Flagg of Fidelity Investments had a great session, Enabling OpenTofu for the Enterprise, detailing how they have built an infrastructure pipeline management platform on OpenTofu.  Their internal customers — software developers, and other infrastructure consumers — asked the platform team to add support for OpenTofu, and the Fidelity team responded. They also noted how they moved to OpenTofu with no significant hurdles.

A hot topic in the IaC community is policy as code, and Colin Lacy from Cisco provided a great introduction in his talk Policy as code for IaC with OPA and OT. In this session, Colin broke down the often challenging task of learning OPA, with great real-world examples. He even shared links to all his examples, so participants could get hands-on experience with one of the most powerful tools in the IaC space.

There were lightning talks on best practices and “the merge conflict.” And an “Ask the Devs!” panel where we answered common community questions, as well as questions from the audience. Topics covered included what it’s like working at OpenTofu, why someone should choose to use OpenTofu, and what it looks like to migrate to OpenTofu. 

Migration from Terraform to OpenTofu, a topic of great interest within the community, was covered by Matt Gowie of Masterpoint in his lightning talk, Migrating a Client onto OpenTofu for Cost + Speed. 

An audience of self-identified OpenTofu practitioners and platform engineers was engaged all day, with plenty of laughs in the room throughout the day. For those of you who couldn’t make it to OpenTofu Day, check the Spacelift blog for updates once the recorded sessions are released. And please, be active in the community! Everyone is encouraged to vote on issues, and we want to hear what you think will make OpenTofu better for everyone.