📄️ What is IaC?
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a key practice within cloud-native platform engineering, enabling teams to manage and provision infrastructure through machine-readable definition files, rather than physical hardware configuration or interactive configuration tools. IaC automates the setup of infrastructure, ensuring that environments are reproducible, scalable, and manageable. This documentation provides an overview of IaC concepts, tools, and best practices, with a particular focus on its role in platform engineering.
📄️ Terraform
Terraform is a powerful, open-source infrastructure as code (IAC) tool that enables you to build, change, and version infrastructure safely and efficiently. It manages external resources (such as public cloud infrastructure, private cloud infrastructure, network appliances, software as a service, and more) with a human-readable configuration language called HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), or optionally JSON. With Terraform, you can manage infrastructure across multiple cloud providers using a single workflow, making it a key tool in the domain of cloud engineering and platform engineering.
📄️ OpenToFu
OpenTofu is a compelling open-source Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tool that has emerged as an alternative to Terraform, especially in light of recent license changes by HashiCorp.
📄️ Alternative IaC Tools
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a crucial practice in modern DevOps and Platform Engineering, enabling teams to manage and provision their infrastructure through code rather than manual processes. While Terraform and the recent release of OpenTofu are well-known IaC tools, several other solutions offer unique features and benefits. Here's an overview of some notable alternative IaC tools.
📄️ Atlantis
Atlantis is an open-source tool that automates Terraform workflows. It provides a collaborative environment for Terraform, enabling teams to work together on infrastructure changes. Atlantis is designed to simplify the process of reviewing, approving, and merging Terraform pull requests, ensuring that infrastructure changes are managed in a controlled and efficient manner. It integrates with version control system (VCS) providers like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket to provide a unified workflow for provisioning and managing infrastructure through pull requests (PRs).