A survey of 350 IT professionals conducted by Firefly, a provider of a platform for managing cloud computing environments, suggests usage of infrastructure-as-code (IaC) tools is evolving rapidly in the cloud computing era.
For example, more than 40% of the respondents reported that, to some degree, they are already using OpenTofu, an open source IaC tool that was launched as a fork of the Terraform IaC in the wake of changes to the software licensing terms it is made available under by HashiCorp. Well over half said they planned to use OpenTofu in the future. That compares to 60% using Terraform today, but only just over 20% said they planned to use Terraform in the future.
The licensing changes HashiCorp implemented only affect third-party entities within a third-party platform. However, the survey indicates the number of end users affected by that change is more substantial than anticipated. A full 56% of respondents described the changes made to the Terraform license as disruptive.
The survey also finds there is a lot more diversity in terms of the types of IaC tools being employed, with both the IaC tools from Pulumi and the open source Crossplane framework being advanced under the auspices of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) also gaining traction. The report finds more than 40% of respondents are also using Pulumi, with well more than half planning to use that IaC tool in the future.
Crossplane, meanwhile, is now being used by 40% of respondents, with 60% planning to adopt it.
Conversely, the report also notes the number of organizations planning to migrate away from CloudFormation from Amazon Web Services (AWS) is rising. While well over 60% use AWS CloudFormation today, only a third plan to use it in the future.
Cindy Blake, vice president of marketing for Firefly, said as organizations employ additional cloud platforms, IT teams are clearly looking for tools that make it easier to centralize the management of multiple computing platforms. That trend will only accelerate as more DevOps teams adopt platform engineering as a methodology for managing the building and deployment of applications at scale, she added.
In fact, noted Blake, it’s already fairly common for IT teams to use two or more frameworks. The report finds 57% of respondents work for organizations that are using two or more frameworks. Overall, the report finds that more than 64% of respondents have also codified more than half of their cloud assets.
The number of organizations employing IaC tools to programmatically manage infrastructure is only going to increase, said Blake. The report, for example, found that three-quarters of respondents either already are or plan to use IaC tools to configure software-as-a-service (SaaS) application environments. In the longer term, advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will make it simpler for organizations to achieve that goal. Open source tools such as AiAC, for example, already make it possible to leverage large language models (LLMs) to generate code. Those types of tools will eventually eliminate the need to master specific programming languages to provision IT infrastructure as code, noted Blake.
It’s not clear how IaC tools within the context of DevOps workflow will evolve, but the one thing that is certain is that the number of types of tools being adopted has never been more diverse.