Terraform vs OpenTofu: How HCL Brings Infrastructure-as-Code to the Cloud

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On August 10, 2023, HashiCorp switched Terraform's license from MPL 2.0 to the Business Source License, prompting a coalition of companies to launch OpenTofu, an open-source fork hosted under the Linux Foundation. Terraform uses HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to let teams declare the desired end state of servers, networks, and databases as versioned text files, rather than configuring them manually through a cloud console. Its core engine compares the declared state against the current real-world state and calculates only the changes needed, making the process idempotent and repeatable. A directed acyclic graph automatically resolves resource dependencies during planning, while remote backends with state locking prevent conflicting changes from multiple team members. Reusable modules allow the same configuration to deploy identical environments, such as staging and production, by simply swapping variable values.

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