For people working in DevOps, infrastructure as code, or technical leadership: are you actively using OpenTofu in production, or seriously considering it for your tooling? If you aren't using OpenTofu, Terraform, or a cloud provider's native option such as AWS CloudFormation or Azure ARM templates, what IaC tool have you chosen instead?
4 Answers
We moved to OpenTofu fairly soon after the fork and now run it across the infrastructure for a mid-sized SaaS product. The migration was painless, and we particularly like features such as provider for_each support, encrypted state, and being able to use variables or locals in backend configuration. Those were capabilities many teams had wanted for a long time.
OpenTofu is one option, but it is not the only alternative. We use it for some Azure work and have also used CloudFormation with Troposphere for AWS. Other teams are moving toward Pulumi, sometimes because they prefer writing infrastructure in a general-purpose language. Crossplane is another option for Kubernetes-oriented environments. OpenTofu works well, although complex HCL can become cumbersome when managing many similar resources, so reusable child modules and carefully designed for_each loops are helpful.
We use OpenTofu mostly to reduce licensing and vendor risk. The HCL and general workflow are familiar, so switching was relatively easy. The main caveat is that the drop-in compatibility is strongest at the CLI and configuration level; surrounding tools and scripts may still need changes. For example, plan files and command names can differ, and you should explicitly configure provider and module sources rather than relying on defaults.
Yes, we use OpenTofu in production. For us it has been a straightforward Terraform replacement, and we have not run into any major issues.
That is exactly the kind of practical adoption information I was looking for. I was mainly trying to understand whether teams were treating it as production-ready rather than experimental.