ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Hi. And welcome to the Kubernetes Podcast from Google. I'm your host, Abdel Sghiouar.

KASLIN FIELDS: And I'm Kaslin Fields.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: In this episode, we talk to Ohad Maislish, the CEO and co-founder of Env0, an infrastructure as code company. Ohad is also one of the co-founders and supporters of OpenTofu, our topic for today. We spoke about the inception of OpenTofu, the open source world, and what the future holds.

KASLIN FIELDS: But first, let's get to the news.

The Kubernetes Removals and Major Changes blog for Version 1.31 is out, with the release expected in the second week of August. The blog highlights two deprecations and four removals. A deprecated feature in Kubernetes is one that will be removed in a future version.

1.31 completes the highly anticipated removal of previously in-tree integrations with cloud providers. This release also features the removal of two additional storage volume plug ins with CSI drivers recommended as replacements. Make sure you check out the blog for an overview of the deprecations and removals in Kubernetes Version 1.31 and watch out for feature blogs diving deeper into 1.31 over the coming weeks.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Google Cloud announces GKE extended support. Users can benefit from an additional 10 months of security patches to their Kubernetes clusters, which fall out of upstream standard support period of one year. Extended support will cost $0.50 per hour in addition to the $0.10 management fee GKE charges.

KASLIN FIELDS: The Cloud Native Computing Foundation announced Bob Killen has joined as a senior technical program manager. Bob has been a member of the Cloud Native community for quite some time and is particularly well-known for his work in Kubernetes SIG contributor experience as a co-chair.

And above all, Bob is a very good friend of the show and its hosts. Bob is awesome. So congratulations to you, Bob, and to the CNCF.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Microsoft announced the general availability of Microsoft Azure Container Storage, a platform managed container native storage service. Azure Container Storage introduces the concept of storage pools, an abstraction layer between persistent volumes and multiple backend storage options, enabling you to leverage the storage option that best aligns with your workload needs. With this announcement, Azure disks and Ephemeral disks are now generally available, while Azure elastic SAN is expected to be generally available soon.

KASLIN FIELDS: The cloud native glossary is now available in Turkish. The community worked for over eight months to translate around 20 pages of the glossary to Turkish, a language spoken by over 100 million people around the world. Congratulations to the contributors for this milestone. And that's the news.

Welcome to the show, Ohad. We're excited to have you on today to talk about OpenTofu. But before we dive into that, could you tell me a little bit about yourself?

OHAD MAISLISH: Yeah, sure. And thank you, Kaslin, for having me today on the podcast. So yeah, I'm Ohad Maislish.

And I have two jobs. I'm first and foremost co-founder and CEO at Env0. It's an infrastructure as code management platform. If you're using infrastructure as code, feel free to check it out.

But today, we're here to talk about my other role. And I'm one of the co-founders of the famous open source project and the new open source project, less than a year, named OpenTofu, backed by the Linux Foundation. So I'm all excited to talk about open source today.

KASLIN FIELDS: Wonderful. And that is one of my favorite topics. So I'm excited to dive into that.

Though one more thing I wanted to mention before we do, that's a couple of your roles, but you also have your own podcast. So today you're the guest, but usually you're the host.

[LAUGHTER]

OHAD MAISLISH: That's true. So I have the IAC podcast that talks about infrastructure as code. It has about 25 episodes so far. And I just, in general, like content, and talking with thought leaders, and thinking about what's going on in the tech world. So yeah, I have my own podcast. And I'm also very happy to be in your podcast today.

KASLIN FIELDS: We're so glad to have you. So anyone out there who is particularly interested in infrastructure as code, I was just looking through the guests. Looks fantastic. So check out the infrastructure as code podcast as well.

OHAD MAISLISH: Thank you so much.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about OpenTofu. And it was called, before, OpenTF. And like you mentioned, it's part of the Linux Foundation, right?

OHAD MAISLISH: Indeed.

KASLIN FIELDS: So one clarification there for me. It's not part of the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, which is where I do a lot of my work. It's part of the Linux Foundation, or is it both?

OHAD MAISLISH: OK. So that's distinct between the two. The CNCF, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation is part of the Linux Foundation.

KASLIN FIELDS: Exactly.

OHAD MAISLISH: So OpenTofu is indeed currently in the Linux Foundation as a project managed by the Linux Foundation. And there is an open ticket to be part of the CNCF. So we all expect that to happen as well.

It's a process. We have all of the right things in order to be in the CNCF. But because we forked an MPL license, and the default in the CNCF is an Apache license, so it's not as easy as the default CNCF project. It needs some manual approvals in order to be part of the CNCF and that's work in progress.

KASLIN FIELDS: A little look at the world of foundations for everyone. I wanted to ask that. Yeah.

OHAD MAISLISH: Yeah. Linux Foundation is a very big foundation and has several subfoundations. The most known obviously is the CNCF, but it's not the only one. And I want to mention that when we announce about the OpenTF initiative-- that's how OpenTofu started, and I'll get to that-- we were approached by several foundations of open source. And we are very happy to collaborate with the Linux Foundation where CNCF exists.

But I have to mention that there are also other very interesting and relevant open source foundations. I'm not the expert in open source foundations, but there are definitely several options.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah. And a lot of my experience is, of course, with CNCF as a section of the Linux Foundation. So it's very interesting and exciting for me today to be talking a little bit kind of a level up with the Linux Foundation.

OHAD MAISLISH: And mentioning CNCF and KubeCon-- not sure if you know, of course you know-- that every KubeCon has some co-hosted events, like an event for Istio and event for Backstage. So there is already OpenTofu Day. We had OpenTofu Day in Paris. And we're going to have another OpenTofu Day in Salt Lake City in Utah in the next KubeCon. So this is yet another association between OpenTofu and the CNCF, which is KubeCon co-hosted events.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yes. So those will be the day before KubeCon's main schedule starts. And these days, when you buy a ticket to KubeCon, as long as you're buying a full pass, you automatically get entrance to the co-located events as well. So definitely check that out.

OHAD MAISLISH: Exactly. That's for the real enthusiasts of open source. They come a day earlier, and they join extra sessions. That's kudos to them.

[LAUGHTER]

KASLIN FIELDS: Got to make the most out of that ticket.

OHAD MAISLISH: For sure.

KASLIN FIELDS: So with that out of the way, let's talk about OpenTofu. So tell me a little bit about the project.

OHAD MAISLISH: If you think about cloud and what's changed in the last five or seven years, the manual click ups of provisioning some cloud resource within AWS or, in this case, of this podcast in GCP, you can click a button, and you get a new virtual machine, or a new database, or some new storage. But probably in the last few years, those clicks less happened and more code execution actually happens that provisions cloud resources. How do you create your GKE or EKS Kubernetes cluster?

So most probably, you have something like Terraform, or an AWS example cloud formation, or you have other options such as Poulomi that defines or reflects that Kubernetes cluster. And executing that code or these commands with these frameworks, provisions, cloud resources. So that's infrastructure as code.

And one of the leading frameworks was open source up until August 2023. And I'm talking about Terraform by HashiCorp. So Terraform was an open source license. And in August 2023, HashiCorp made a big decision to change a lot of their projects, most of their projects from open source license to what's called business license with some limitations.

A lot of folks from the community and some vendors thought that it really makes sense to ensure not just open source, but open governance of the future of infrastructure as code within the Terraform technology. And I was one of the folks that worked together with others to make sure it's happening. And we collaborated with the Linux Foundation.

But we'll get to that. So that's the original story of what is OpenTofu. And it's a fork of the Terraform project. And it continues to have its own features with compatibility, or almost full compatibility with the Terraform project.

KASLIN FIELDS: And OpenTofu spun up in just September of 2023, so not quite a year old yet. Almost there, actually.

OHAD MAISLISH: There was work from mid-August until the announcement in late September by the Linux Foundation. We started as the OpenTF Initiative. And we thought about OpenSearch back then from Elastic.

So we wanted something to start with open to make sure it's open source and that everybody would understand that this is open source. So we started with the OpenTF Initiative. We collaborated with the Linux Foundation.

And they suggested to stay a bit away from the TF kind of trademark, the Terraform trademark. And we thought it makes sense to do something a bit funny. So that's how we changed the OpenTF name to OpenTofu. And the logo represents tofu.

[LAUGHS]

So we're all vegans, basically. No, just kidding.

KASLIN FIELDS: Infrastructure vegans.

OHAD MAISLISH: Something like that. Yeah.

KASLIN FIELDS: So it's very interesting to me. I wanted to ask about the Linux Foundation relationship there. And I was reading through the blog post where OpenTofu was announced as part of the Linux Foundation, and I noticed in there that there was some discussion about a lot of the companies that are supporting OpenTofu. And it specifically mentioned some commitment that they made to continue supporting it, especially as the project gets spun up. So how is that going so far?

OHAD MAISLISH: This is amazing. We are four or five companies that decided that we will commit not just marketing efforts, but actual hands on developers working in a dedicated way on that project. Env0 is definitely one of the companies behind the project. We have full-time employees that do nothing but coding OpenTofu and code and pull requests.

And I want to mention our partners, Harness and Spacelift and Scalr and Gruntwork, the creators of Terragrunt. All of those together work every day to make OpenTofu better with dedicated resources. And what unsurprisingly happened as well is that we have great developers from the community that contribute code on a daily basis. So having dedicated resources, together with the ongoing support from the community, I think makes OpenTofu a well-deserved success, in my nonbiased opinion.

[LAUGHS]

KASLIN FIELDS: And the community around this does seem quite significant, especially for a project that's only been around for a year. And some of that comes from it being born from an existing project, I'm sure. But I'm sure that there is a lot of uniqueness to the community around OpenTofu and a lot of excitement around the work that you're all doing.

OHAD MAISLISH: I think what we see that excites the community the most is not just to contribute to code, but to influence the architecture of the project. So we have some RFPs that we post. And basically, we ask the community, what do you think we should do in order to make this product better? It's not just about prioritizing tickets, it's actual architecture and approaches to different things, like the state encryption that we released on 1.7.

So we would discuss that with the community and the community can influence on what is the right approach to do. And that's what we do. We look at what the community wants, and that's what we implement.

And I think besides the license of a project, I think maybe even more important is how you ensure that this project evolves in the natural way that makes sense for this technology. And you can only do that if you really involve working and listening to the community.

KASLIN FIELDS: And I was reading a little bit about OpenTofu Version 1.6.x, which I believe was perhaps your first version under the OpenTofu name. And I was wondering, have there been further releases since 1.6.x? Where's the project right now?

OHAD MAISLISH: Yeah, let's dive in into the specific version. So Terraform 1.5, specifically 1.5.7, was open source. And we forked kind of from that. This is still an open source, and you can use Terraform 1.5 as an open source project.

When they started actually working on Terraform 1.6, at some point of time, they changed the license. So we started there. And the first thing we wanted to do is just to release the OpenTofu first stable release, which indeed happened in January 2024. And OpenTofu 1.6 is really, really, really with the same concepts as Terraform 1.6.

Now 1.7, if I remember correctly, was released, I think, in late April or early May, OpenTofu 1.7. And that included some concepts that exist in Terraform 1.7. But I think more important is the innovation that started to come to OpenTofu.

So OpenTofu 1.7 includes the long awaited state encryption. And state encryption basically means that you can store your information in the state. And sometimes, this contains sensitive information that you don't want people to have access to. It was always a risk for everybody working with Terraform. And it was one of the top voted issues in Terraform project.

And we decided to prioritize that as part of the 1.7 release. And it was a very important differentiation. And we got a lot of great feedback from a lot of users.

Now we're talking end of July 2024. We just released last week, or this week, the release candidate for 1.8. And next week we're going to release the AGA version of 1.8.

And that includes another long awaited innovation in the Terraform projects. It's an early evaluation of variables within modules, and that's also something that we already saw from the alpha release and definitely from the beta and the release candidate of 1.8, that this is another major capability within this Terraform ecosystem that the community has long awaited.

So we already released three version, 1.6, 1.7, and now 1.8. And in the last two versions, and definitely the next versions, we plan on having more and more unique innovation to give you more and more reasons to choose OpenTofu besides the governance and the open source license.

KASLIN FIELDS: So if you're listening to this and you're interested in going and checking out OpenTofu, 1.8 at least should be out. So definitely go check out the most recent version of OpenTofu. And you mentioned users there. How has user adoption been going for the project?

OHAD MAISLISH: What I enjoy the most is just to look at the Slack workspace of OpenTofu. It has thousands of users. And to see what they write, what they ask, what they're suggesting, it's amazing to see the strength of the community, and the comments that we get on our social media, whether it's LinkedIn or Twitter. People care.

And I also want to mention, not a lot of people know, but Terraform itself, although it changed its license on August 2023, but two years before that on September 21, Terraform, code Terraform stopped accepting community pull requests. So the license was open source for two years before it changed. But during those two years, the community couldn't really affect the project. You can use the open source license, but minimal or zero possibility to affect the project.

So it's been two, now almost three years that the community really, really wants to influence the future of infrastructures, code and cloud native, and multi-cloud era. So we see that-- I don't want to say pain, but this long awaited urge to be able to influence the architecture of the future of that project really makes a lot of people happy, from what I see.

KASLIN FIELDS: Wonderful. That is, of course, why a lot of us do open source, is we love to be able to have an impact on the software that we use day-to-day.

OHAD MAISLISH: May I say something? And kudos to AWS. A few months ago, the Linux Foundation released Valkey, which is the fork of Redis. And AWS, together with other companies, decided to support Valkey.

And in their blog from April, the AWS blog of why AWS supports Valkey, there is a shout out to OpenTofu. They say open source Terraform now lives on as OpenTofu, issuing its first stable release in January as a vendor-neutral community-led project. The project is undergoing rapid development on new features, attracting new contributors, and adoption is growing.

And then they say, AWS says, we hope that the Valkey project follows a similar trajectory. And reading something like that from AWS' official blog was a very happy moment for me to see this credibility. And it means a lot to see this is being accepted this way.

KASLIN FIELDS: A lot of open source work tends to be kind of behind the scenes. A lot of folks use open source and also don't contribute to it.

OHAD MAISLISH: Definitely.

KASLIN FIELDS: And so sometimes the work can be very hidden. So an acknowledgment like that is certainly exciting.

OHAD MAISLISH: Indeed.

KASLIN FIELDS: And so you mentioned the new feature that the team at OpenTofu, the contributors to OpenTofu worked on for 1.7, the stateful encryption. I'm wondering if there are other particular features or projects that the community is working on that you'd like to highlight.

OHAD MAISLISH: There are a lot of great requests. I think I saw recently that there is a discussion to start planning the next versions and how we reprioritize. To be honest, I'm not involved in that process. I just see that there is an open discussion about the requests.

We posted several times and called the community to vote on what's important. And we have this dashboard that shows all of the top rated issues that we want to fix. So honestly, I'm not on a day-to-day basis involved in the project. I was one of the co-founders.

But now I see that this is just like a baby that grew into, I don't know, a man or a woman, and now--

KASLIN FIELDS: A walking, talking thing.

OHAD MAISLISH: Exactly. And I'm just meeting that person every few weeks. And I ask do you need any help? Anything that you want to update?

But it's kind of independent now. That's even more beautiful to see how mature it became. So back to your question, I'm not the right person to ask about the specific new capabilities. There are great other folks from the OpenTofu. We call them the core team.

So I'm not a member in the core team. I'm co-founder. But that's a question to the core team that is working on a daily basis on that project.

KASLIN FIELDS: That's a wonderful shout out to the organization and process. One thing that really struck me as I was going through the docs and the website of OpenTofu is that it feels like a fairly mature project in terms of the processes and resources that are in place for it.

I noticed that on the website, there's a very clear link and area that tells you about how you can get started as a contributor. And I was actually looking through some of the issues there. So it seems very active. And hearing that there's a core team, I was kind of curious about the organization, how the triage of those issues works, and how the community is organized. So that's some useful insight.

OHAD MAISLISH: Yeah, for sure. And we've learned a lot from the Linux Foundation. And for the Linux Foundation, OpenTofu is one of the most active and important projects in the last year. It was announced under Keynote by their managing director in September, and they keep on mentioning OpenTofu. And they give us reasonable resources and advice, not reasonable, I think they gave us very good resources and advice on how to build a successful open source project.

And I also want to mention one of the key companies behind OpenTofu, as I mentioned earlier, is Gruntwork. And there are two amazing founders there, Jim and Josh, and they created Terragrunt. And they know a lot about open source project.

They created Terragrunt and Terratest. And they're definitely thought leaders. So I honestly learned from Jim and Josh about open governance and how to work with the community. So learning from the folks at Gruntwork and learning from the folks at the Linux Foundation, I think, really helped us to become a mature open source project pretty quickly, in my opinion.

KASLIN FIELDS: I think a lot of folks kind of struggle to wrap their heads around what a foundation really does. And I think you've pointed out some really useful things here on the advice that they've given you around licenses, around organization, around all sorts of things.

OHAD MAISLISH: Yeah. In the early days, I think we met them, like, twice a week to understand what we need to do. Now we definitely meet less frequently. So yeah, kudos to them. And we learned a lot from them. And we would not be where we are if it wasn't for them.

KASLIN FIELDS: Good systems. And a lot of the folks out there listening, I'm sure, are infrastructure engineers, platform engineers who are living the life of trying to manage the infrastructure of businesses. I'm sure a lot of folks are familiar with infrastructure as code in one form or another or several.

So if folks out there want to get started and learn more about OpenTofu, maybe contribute, what kinds of resources would you point them to? And how can folks learn more about OpenTofu?

OHAD MAISLISH: So definitely the two first websites to check out is opentofu.org, which shows what OpenTofu is and all of the relevant resources. But sometimes you just want to get your hands dirty and see the code, so the GitHub repo of OpenTofu. And those are definitely the first two places.

Inside those websites, there is a link to the Community Slack workspace. You can just join and see the different channels and learn and ask questions there. I think it's pretty wide open and transparent where are the guidelines, and what's going on, what's the activities. So yeah, opentofu.org, Slack workspace, and definitely the GitHub project, that I didn't mention, but I think already has 22 or something thousand stars.

KASLIN FIELDS: Wonderful. And you also mentioned at the beginning of the show, the Day 0 event, the co-located event that will be happening at KubeCon. I didn't get to go to the event last time. If you were involved with that event, do you have any insight on what kinds of activities will be going on at the co-located event at KubeCon, in case folks are interested in that?

OHAD MAISLISH: Yeah. So we are actively working on the CFBs and reviewing the submissions. I have the honor to be in this committee that actually reviews the submissions. And there are some very high quality submissions. So I expect for this event in Utah to be super exciting.

From the last event in Europe, in Paris, we had, again, some great sessions that talk about the technology, talk about the migration, or let's say switch, just to switch from Terraform to OpenTofu, hearing about that from customers, enterprise companies using OpenTofu. And one of the sessions I really liked in KubeCon about OpenTofu Day was the maintainers of the project named Atlantis. So a shout out to Pepe and Dylan from Atlantis project.

That is now also an official CNCF project. And they help users around the world with GitOps of infrastructures code that supports Terraform, Terragrant, and OpenTofu in other frameworks. And they've talked about Atlantis and OpenTofu. And I think that was definitely an interesting thing for the community to see, that once OpenTofu becomes a meaningful project, other projects start supporting OpenTofu.

So Atlantis was a great session in KubeCon. And if I just mention, besides your question about the event, we see more and more both open source projects and vendors using OpenTofu, supporting OpenTofu, deprecating, removing support of Terraform, and switching to OpenTofu. And Atlantis is one that added support for OpenTofu. So just seeing this kind of adoption signals about the maturity of such a project.

KASLIN FIELDS: And I believe co-located events, usually the sessions are recorded. I'm not sure if that's always the case. Do you know if there's a playlist on YouTube of the sessions from Europe?

OHAD MAISLISH: I'm actually not sure. I would imagine that there is. I'm pretty sure there is.

KASLIN FIELDS: I'll find out. And we'll let you know in the chatter.

OHAD MAISLISH: Please.

KASLIN FIELDS: And we'll have links to it if we're able to find links to those.

OHAD MAISLISH: Thank you.

KASLIN FIELDS: But I look forward to seeing the schedule for this time.

OHAD MAISLISH: Yeah, we're working on it now. So stay tuned.

KASLIN FIELDS: Thank you for your work on that CFP. And thank you for teaching me today about OpenTofu. If you're interested in learning more about how OpenTofu enables infrastructure as code, open source, make sure you check out the website, the Slack, and the GitHub repo. And we'll have those links in the show notes. Thanks for joining me today, Ohad.

OHAD MAISLISH: Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Well, thank you, Kaslin, for that interview. I have been wanting to actually talk to somebody about OpenTofu for a while.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah, well, I completed this interview. Abdel initiated it.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yes. I mean, I met the Env0 people at KubeCon Paris this year. And through some connections, we ended up just chatting with Ohad. So I had to chat with him on the call.

And then we decided to do it. It just took some time. But I'm glad we managed to do it, because OpenTofu was quite a big deal at some points this year.

KASLIN FIELDS: Something that was interesting to me about this one is this is one of those CNCF projects that-- I haven't used it directly. I'm not super familiar with it.

It's quite new, so a lot of people are not very familiar with it. And yet I am. And yet I have used something very similar, at least.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah, I haven't used OpenTofu per se, but my understanding from chatting with Ohad before the interview was that, at least at that point, the fork was backwards compatible with Terraform, which means you could write Terraform code and just still run it with the OpenTofu tool, or the other way around, that kind of understanding. I don't know. At that time when we chatted, Ohad was not sure how they will diverge in the future.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah, I did not ask about that.

[LAUGHS]

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. Well, I mean, to be very honest with you, and this is going to be on the recording, so I have to be careful how I frame this. I was never a big fan of Terraform myself.

KASLIN FIELDS: Very careful.

[LAUGHTER]

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: I mean, this is my opinion. I'm free to share my opinion. I never really liked the tool. And I never really liked that configuration language. I don't know why.

KASLIN FIELDS: I'm very interested in that. Yeah. It was the first experience for me with infrastructure as code.

And I distinctly remember, I was at an event several years ago and someone asked me for my opinions on GitOps, which was the first time that I had heard the term. And I was like, well, Git is a whole mess of itself. So not feeling great about that part of it.

But once I dove into it later, I was, like, oh, it's the concepts behind Terraform, essentially. You're putting your infrastructure into code, which I'm very much all for.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. I mean, I'm all for GitOps. I'd much rather do it with other tools, like Poulomi, or write my own bash scripts rather than using Terraform.

But that's just me, right? Other people like it. So power to you, I guess.

KASLIN FIELDS: I do think it's interesting how that space has kind of expanded, right?

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. Yeah. Because then Pulumi came out. And then the whole kind of Crossplane or KRM, that's the Kubernetes resource management way of doing things. So I would have to guess it's probably because there are people like me who don't want to use Terraform and we're looking for alternatives. That's just my assumption, right?

KASLIN FIELDS: I like how you also mentioned, though, bash scripts. Because it's not like this problem and the solution appeared out of nowhere. It's something that people have been dealing with, sysadmins or platform engineers or whatever they've been called throughout the years have been creating bash scripts to manage a lot of this stuff for a long time. But it's just kind of an evolution of that solution.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. I mean, that's how I started. I mean, there is probably some bash scripts somewhere running that I wrote 10 years ago.

KASLIN FIELDS: Oh, no.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: I'm sorry if you are listening to this and you're using it. But actually, one thing that was very interesting to me when I talked with Ohad at the time, and you chatted about this during the interview-- so one thing I didn't know and one thing that was interesting.

One of the things I didn't know is that Terraform themself, they didn't really open up Terraform to community contributions up till very recently, right?

KASLIN FIELDS: Well, I think the way that I interpreted it, and I might be wrong on this interpretation, but I believe that they were accepting community contributions. And then up to a year or something before they switched the license, then they weren't accepting any more community contributions.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Oh, it was the other way around. Got it.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah, that's my understanding.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: OK. OK. OK, sure. Well, that explains.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah, it makes much, much more sense, right?

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: It does. And then the other thing is the fact that when they released OpenTofu, one of the first things that they wanted to add was the most voted for feature in Terraform, the state encryption.

KASLIN FIELDS: It makes sense.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: It sounds like they really wanted to differentiate themselves right out of the box.

KASLIN FIELDS: Well, it also sounds like a lot of the folks contributing to open tofu are folks who had contributed to Terraform in the past. And so that may have been a change that they had wanted to work on. But since Terraform had not been accepting community contributions for some time, they hadn't been able to work on that. So this gave them an opportunity to do the work that they already wanted to do, I imagine.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: That's actually a very good way of looking at things. Yeah, that's a very valid point. I just like that, OK, let's fork this thing, and just implement the thing that people want the most.

But it was pretty cool. Ohad is pretty knowledgeable and has been around for a while.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah, absolutely. Since you had set this up, and I hadn't really talked to the Env0 people, and I didn't know much about Ohad going into this, and then I was looking into some of the work that he's done. And I was, like, wow. This is pretty cool.

[LAUGHING]

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. Yeah. No, he has been around for a while. He has been doing quite a lot of good stuff.

KASLIN FIELDS: And a fellow podcaster on top of it.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yes. Yes. The infrastructure as code podcast, which we need to find an excuse to be on, I guess.

KASLIN FIELDS: I don't know if I need to put more work on my own plate.

[LAUGHS]

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Come on, being on podcasts is fun.

KASLIN FIELDS: It's true.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: We get to talk to people.

KASLIN FIELDS: It is really fun. If you see us at KubeCon, come say hi.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yes, please. Yes.

KASLIN FIELDS: We'll be doing our mini interviews. And we'll need folks to talk to.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Exactly. Yeah. And the other thing that was quite interesting, besides the features and the releases and all that stuff is Ohad mentioned that there was a fork of Redis called Valkey, right?

And Amazon started supporting Valkey. And then they wrote, actually, an article. And in that article, they said we would like Valkey to follow the same step as OpenTofu.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah, very interesting. I would like to read that.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: I added the blog to the show notes so it will include it in the notes for the episode. But I find that interesting, that a large cloud provider goes, like, all right, so the community did a good job. Because I think that there was probably a lot of skepticism when there was this wave of just people forking stuff. Because Valkey and OpenTofu happened not far away from each other, as forks.

And I think in the community, there was this question of whether this is kind of indicative of a trend. Is this going to happen more? Are we just going to keep forking stuff? I think that that's a testament to the success of the community in forking and continuing evolving the tool separately.

KASLIN FIELDS: And such is open source, right? The spirit of open source is alive and well.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Exactly. Exactly. No, I'm a big fan of the whole concept of, all right, you change the license. We're just going to do our own thing.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah. If you want to, then I guess you can do that.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. Yeah. So I think it's pretty cool.

KASLIN FIELDS: Yeah. And for folks who are interested in what OpenTofu is doing and want to get hands on, I like that Ohad mentioned that they have a Day 0 event at KubeCon North America and they had one at KubeCon EU as well.

Day 0 events are one of my favorite things, honestly, about KubeCon. Because it's an opportunity for you to dive really deep into some particular area before KubeCon itself starts. The KubeCon schedule is, of course, very varied. Even within a single track, you get a lot of different topics.

So one thing I was explaining to someone recently, actually, is that the concept of tracks-- at one point, a track was held in a single room at the conference. And just the schedule was what was going on in that room for the entire day. And the track chair would be the host of that room. So it'd be kind of a mini conference within the conference.

Kubecon is so big at this point that they don't really do that anymore. But that's the way that I try to think about tracks at conferences is it's a whole bunch of things that are kind of meant to go together. If you were to sit in a single room all day, if you were the audience of that track, then that would work for you.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yeah. And I mean, OpenTofu Day, which is a co-located event, is included in tickets for--

KASLIN FIELDS: Exactly. And now Day 0 events are included in the ticket. So you can go to the deeper dive that you want to go to. So those are wonderful. Make sure that you make use of those if you get a chance to go to a KubeCon event.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yep. We'll make sure to have a link for you for that in the show notes. And there is one last thing I wanted to mention.

So I had some really interesting conversations about this whole topic of OpenTofu and Terraform with Ohad, but with other people. But I don't think that conversation can actually be on the podcast. So if you come to KubeCon and come talk to me, then I can tell you what this conversation looked like.

KASLIN FIELDS: All right.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: I have some juicy details.

[LAUGHTER]

So some behind the scenes, let's just put it this way.

KASLIN FIELDS: All right. So make sure you find us if you happen to be in an event that we're at. We tend to keep Twitter updated with where we are, at least.

ABDEL SGHIOUAR: Yes. Yes. Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Kaslin.

KASLIN FIELDS: Thank you, Abdel. And thank you, everyone, for listening.

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ABDEL SGHIOUAR: That brings us to the end of another episode. If you enjoyed the show, please help us spread the word and tell a friend. If you have any feedback for us, you can find us on social media at Kubernetes pod or reach us by email at <kubernetespodcast@google.com>.

You can also check out our website at kubernetespodcast.com, where you will find transcripts and show nodes and links to subscribe. Please consider rating us in your podcast player so we can help more people find and enjoy the show. Thanks for listening. And we'll see you next time.

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