Project OpenTaco: An Open Standard for Terraform Automation
digger.dev
digger.dev
Allow me to explain the initiative. Under per-run and resources-under-management pricing models many organizations have adopted workarounds and shortcuts that slow the growth of IaC adoption, and are incredibly frustrated by the arrangement. ([1], [2])
But wait - what about OpenTofu?
With OpenTofu, the community already has a credible open-source CLI alternative to BSL-licensed Terraform by Hashicorp. However that only solves half the problem: while the CLI helps teams avoid lock in to BSL licensed Terraform, it doesn’t address governance or collaboration challenges at scale any bigger than a single laptop. That's what TACOs are for; but so far, no open source project was able to challenge Terraform Cloud / Terraform Enterprise.
This is what led to the idea behind project opentaco. The project aims to add the missing enterprise workflows (currently proprietary and extractively priced) to Terraform and OpenTofu: secure remote runs, granular access controls, automated drift detection, enterprise SSO, and stack management, to be delivered as an open, self-hostable tool.
We feel this is Terraform’s “backstage” moment. Backstage did for Internal Developer Portals what we believe Project OpenTaco will do for IaC automation. Before Backstage, enterprises had scattered service catalogs and homegrown portals; Backstage created a standard, defined the category of IDPs, and won adoption at some of the world’s most recognizable companies [3]. We are building OpenTaco to follow the same path for Terraform and OpenTofu orchestration as the open standard.
We’re happy to launch v0.0 today (demo here [4], docs here (5)), you can try it starting today, we’d love any and all feedback!
[1]:https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7376235... [2]:https://www.linkedin.com/posts/coquinn_am-i-getting-this-rig... [3]:https://github.com/backstage/backstage/blob/master/ADOPTERS.... [4]:https://www.loom.com/share/046b75fdc4e54cfa8d5089a1eb02f272 [5]:https://docs.digger.dev/ce/state-management/architecture