A reader sent me a question I’ve been getting more often lately: they’re running Terraform 1.5, S3 backend, no Terraform Cloud, no HCP. Is it worth moving to OpenTofu? Short answer: probably yes, and this setup happens to be close to the easiest case there is. Here’s why. The fork point matters OpenTofu forked from Terraform 1.5.x, the last version released under the MPL license before HashiCorp switched to BSL. So if you’re still on 1....
If you’ve been using Terraform Cloud for a while, you’ve probably hit at least one of these: the pricing model changed and suddenly it’s expensive, applies take 10+ minutes, or the state files have grown into something nobody wants to touch. You’re not alone. This comes up a lot in Terraform discussions lately. This post covers the main tools people are using to solve these problems in 2025–2026, with a focus on two separate issues that often get conflated: GitOps orchestration (who triggers plans, who approves applies) and state management at scale (why applies are slow and what to do about it)....
GitHub’s platform engineering team on how they tackle infrastructure problems at scale: Understanding your domain: Talk to neighboring teams with more experience Investigate old issues to understand system limitations Read documentation to build foundational knowledge Platform-specific skills: Network fundamentals (TCP, UDP, L4 load balancing, debugging tools) Operating systems and hardware selection for scalability and cost Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, Consul) Distributed systems understanding (failures are inevitable, need failover/recovery) Impact radius considerations:...