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Automation with OpenTofu

OpenTofu is an OSS tool for building, changing, and versioning infrastructure safely and efficiently. OpenTofu can manage existing and popular service providers (AWS, Azure, Google Cloud, etc.) as well as custom in-house solutions.

The key features of OpenTofu are:

  • Infrastructure as Code: Infrastructure is described using a high-level configuration syntax. This allows a blueprint of your datacenter to be versioned and treated as you would any other code. Additionally, infrastructure can be shared and re-used.
  • Execution Plans: OpenTofu has a "planning" step where it generates an execution plan. The execution plan shows what OpenTofu will do when you call apply. This lets you avoid any surprises when OpenTofu manipulates infrastructure.
  • Resource Graph: OpenTofu builds a graph of all your resources, and parallelizes the creation and modification of any non-dependent resources. Because of this, OpenTofu builds infrastructure as efficiently as possible, and operators get insight into dependencies in their infrastructure.
  • Change Automation: Complex changesets can be applied to your infrastructure with minimal human interaction. With the previously mentioned execution plan and resource graph, you know exactly what OpenTofu will change and in what order, avoiding many possible human errors.

OpenTofu Features

Backend for state and lock

The backend defines where OpenTofu stores its state data files. And some of the backend types support locking of the state file as well to avoid multiple process (or multiple people) making changes to the state file at the same time. Available backends are listed on the OpenTofu documentation

OpenTofu CLI

Some of the most used tofu commands are listed below.

Init

tofu init

Plan

tofu plan

To save the output of the plan command:

tofu plan -out tfplan

Apply

tofu apply

For auto approval:

tofu apply -auto-approve

If the outplan of the plan command was previously saved, it can be passed to the apply command:

tofu apply tfplan

Destroy

To destroy/remove all the provisioned resources:

tofu destroy