Cloud & Infrastructure
Infrastructure as Code
Tools for defining, provisioning, and managing infrastructure through code
Overview
Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools allow teams to define and manage cloud infrastructure using declarative or imperative configuration files. This approach brings software engineering practices — version control, code review, testing — to infrastructure management.
Top Players
Terraform
- Company: HashiCorp / IBM (USA)
- Market Position: De facto standard for multi-cloud IaC
- Key Strengths: Provider ecosystem (3,000+ providers), HCL language, state management, plan/apply workflow, massive community
- License: BSL 1.1 (formerly open-source)
- Typical Users: DevOps and platform engineering teams across all cloud providers
OpenTofu
- Maintained by: Linux Foundation
- Market Position: Open-source fork of Terraform, rapidly growing
- Key Strengths: Truly open-source (MPL 2.0), drop-in Terraform replacement, community-governed, state encryption
- Typical Users: Organizations preferring open-source licensing
Pulumi
- Company: Pulumi Corporation (USA)
- Market Position: Leading alternative using general-purpose programming languages
- Key Strengths: Write IaC in TypeScript, Python, Go, C#, Java; strong type safety; Pulumi AI for generation
- Deployment: Cloud (Pulumi Cloud) or self-managed state
- Typical Users: Development teams who prefer real programming languages over DSLs
AWS CloudFormation
- Company: Amazon Web Services (USA)
- Market Position: Native IaC for AWS
- Key Strengths: Deep AWS integration, no additional cost, StackSets for multi-account, drift detection
- Deployment: AWS-only
- Typical Users: AWS-only organizations
Ansible
- Company: Red Hat / IBM (USA)
- Market Position: Leader in configuration management and IT automation
- Key Strengths: Agentless (SSH-based), simple YAML playbooks, massive module library, both provisioning and configuration
- Products: Ansible Core (open-source), Ansible Automation Platform (enterprise)
- Typical Users: IT operations teams, hybrid/on-premise environments
Key Trends
- Policy-as-code: OPA, Sentinel, and Checkov for infrastructure compliance guardrails
- AI-assisted IaC: AI copilots generating infrastructure code from natural language
- Crossplane: Kubernetes-native infrastructure provisioning via custom resources
- Platform engineering: IaC abstracted behind self-service developer portals (Backstage, Port)