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Comment by geerlingguy | Hacker News Reader

The BSL licensing thing has turned off a lot of the more hobbyist/tinkerer-centric users who really rocketed HashiCorp's products up the ladder in their orgs.

It's a bit like Elasticsearch, I think—it's gotten big enough it won't be a quick death, but I don't see Hashi's products growing/dominating as much now as I did a couple years ago.

(As an aside, I'd like to thank Mitchell for his work over the years, Vagrant especially was huge in my infrastructure work, and Terraform was a great companion to Ansible and CloudFormation as we automated more and more stuff.)

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It's true that the licensing change is a turnoff, but Terraform redefined an industry. What's the alternative?

(I'm hoping Mitchell is going to have an answer to that)

It was forked. The OpenTofu variant seems to have backing. Used it yesterday.

Pulumi and Crossplane

Or OpenTF if you want to same thing minus the licensing mess

> Crossplane

I tried to understand what is it, how it works, what is it good for, but ... never managed to. It still has the same "build control planes without needing to write code" on its website. okay, it says "orchestrate applications and infrastructure". that's at least makes sense when the context is Terraform and Pulumi.

okay, in the quickstart the whole thing seems like code. but okay.

ah, so you can use k8s CRDs to define cloud stuff (like S3 buckets and GCP GCS buckets and whatnot), not bad, but super verbose.

Pulumi -> Same end result as Terraform but you use Code (python, go, typescript) to describe resources instead of hcl

Crossplane -> Same end result as Terraform but you use K8s resources in YAML to describe your infra.

I hope that helps. But I agree that the crossplane/upbound marketing is super confusing.

Thanks for noting these. From my experience, neither can replace terraform (though Pulumi might be on the right track). Neither come anywhere close to the Terraform AWS provider, and tightly coupling my IaC to Kubernetes is a non-starter for me (and I'm sure for many others as well).

Imo main benefit is you can use 1 tool/deploy pipeline for app and infrastructure.

Yes, technically you can do that with Terraform but in my experience it doesn't work great for code deploys (which tend to have procedural steps)

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