
Ohad Maislish is the CEO and co-founder of env0 and part of the founding team for the OpenTofu project. Before env0, Ohad was the CEO and founder of Arno Software, a cloud infrastructure services company, and Capester, a startup that empowered...
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Abdel Sikhiwar
Hi and welcome to the Kubernetes podcast from Google. I'm your host Abdel Sikhiwar.
Kazlan Fields
And I'm Kazlan Fields.
Abdel Sikhiwar
In this episode we talk to Uhad Maisle, the CEO and co founder of Envzero, an infrastructure as code company. Uhad is also one of the co founders and supporters of Open Tofu, our topic for today. We spoke about the inception of Open Tofu, the open source world and what the future holds.
Kazlan 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 intrigue integrations with cloud providers. This release also features the removal of two additional storage volume plugins 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, Google Cloud.
Abdel Sikhiwar
Announced 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.$5 per hour in addition to the 0.$1 management fee GKE charges.
Kazlan 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.
Abdel Sikhiwar
The cncf 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.
Kazlan 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 Open Tofu. But before we dive into that, could you tell me a little bit about yourself?
Ohad Maislish
Yeah, sure. And thank you, Kathleen, for having me today on the podcast. So, yeah, I'm Oad Maislish and I have two jobs. I'm first and foremost co founder and CEO at End of Zero. 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 a new Open Source project less than a year named Open Tofu, backed by the Linux Foundation. So I'm all excited to talk about Open Source today.
Kazlan 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.
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.
Kazlan Fields
We're so glad to have you. So anyone out there who's 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.
Kazlan 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.
Kazlan 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
Okay, so let's distinct between the 2. The CNCF, the cloud native Computing foundation is part of the Linux Foundation.
Kazlan Fields
Exactly.
Ohad Maislish
So Open TOEFL 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, the Default in the CNCF is 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.
Kazlan Fields
A little look at the world of foundations for everyone. I wanted to ask that. Yeah, yeah.
Ohad Maislish
Linux foundation is a very big foundation and has several sub foundations. 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 Open TOEFL 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.
Kazlan Fields
Yeah, and a lot of my experiences of course with CNCF as like 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.
Ohad Maislish
The Linux foundation 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 Open Tofu Day. We had Open Tofu Day in Paris and we're going to have another Open Tofu Day in Salt Lake City in Utah in the next kubecon. So this is yet another association between Open Tofu and the CNCF which is kubecon co hosted events.
Kazlan Fields
Yes. So those will be the day before Kubecon's main schedule starts. And these days when you buy a ticket to Kubecon you automatically, 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, you know, the real enthusiasts of open source they come a day earlier and they join extra sessions. That's kudos to them.
Kazlan Fields
Gotta make the most out of that ticket for sure. So with that out of the way, let's talk about Open Tofu. 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 happen 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 in AWS example Cloudformation or you have other options such as Pulumi 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, 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 will get to that. So that's the original story of how 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.
Kazlan Fields
And Open Tofu spun up in just September of 2023. Right. So not quite a year old yet. Almost there.
Ohad Maislish
Actually 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 telephone 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. So we're all vegans basically. No, just kidding.
Kazlan Fields
Infrastructure vegans, something like that.
Ohad Maislish
Yeah.
Kazlan 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 Open Tofu 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 Open Tofu. And it specifically mentioned some commitment that they made to continue or supporting it, especially as the project gets spun up. So how is that going so far?
Ohad Maislish
This is amazing. You know, we are four or five companies that decided that we will commit not just, you know, marketing efforts but actual hands on developers working in a dedicated way on that project. NF is definitely one of the companies behind the project. We have full time employees that do nothing but coding, Open TOEFL and Code and Pull request. And I want to mention our partners Harness and Spacelift and Scalyr and Gruntwork, the creators of terragrant. All of those together work every day to make Open Tofu better with dedicated resources. And what unsurprisingly happened as well 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 Open TOEFL its well deserved success. In my non biased opinion.
Kazlan Fields
And the community around this does seem quite significant for 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 Open Tofu 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 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.
Kazlan Fields
And I was reading a little bit about Open Tofu version 1.6.x which I believe was perhaps your first version under the Open Tofu 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 or this is still like an open source and you can use Terraform 1.5 as an open source project. When they started Hashico 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 Open Tofu first stable release, which indeed happened in January 2024. And Open Tofu 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, open tofu 1.7. And that included some concepts that exist in telephone 1.7. But I think more important is the innovation that started to come to Open Tofu. So open tofu 1.7 includes the long awaited state encryption. And state encryption basically means that you can store your information in the state. 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 GA version of 1.8. And that includes another long awaited innovation in the Terraform projects. It's 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 Open Tofu besides the governance and the Open Source license.
Kazlan 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 21st terraform core 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 infrastructure as code in 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 or the future of that project really makes a lot of people happy from what I see.
Kazlan 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
And may I say something and kudos to aws. A few months ago the Linux foundation released a 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 Valky there is a shout out to Open Tofu. They say Open Source Terraform now lives on as open Tofu issuing its first stable release in January is a vendor neutral community led project. The project is undergoing rapid development of new features, attracting new contributors and adoption is growing. And then they say AWS says we hope that the Valkyrie 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.
Kazlan 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 definitely. And so sometimes the work can be very hidden. So an acknowledgement like that is certainly exciting indeed. 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 prioritize. 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, you know, it's like a baby that grew into, I don't know, a man or a woman and now walking, talking thing. Exactly. And I'm just meeting that person every few weeks and 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 Open toefl, 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.
Kazlan 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. Open TOEFL is one of the most active and important projects in the last year. It was announced on their keynote by their managing director in September and they keep on mentioning Open TOEFL and they give us reasonable resources and advice. Not reasonable like they give 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 Open toefl, as I mentioned earlier, is Gruntwork. And there are two amazing founders there, Jim and Josh, and they created terragrant and they know a lot about open source project. They create terragrant 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 Grant Work and learning from the folks at the Linux Foundation, I think really help us to become a mature open source project pretty quickly in my opinion.
Kazlan 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 like 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, you know, 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.
Kazlan 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 open Tofu?
Ohad Maislish
So definitely the two first websites to check out is opentofu.org which shows what open Tofu 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 open Tofu 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, the Slack workspace and definitely the GitHub project that I didn't mention but I think already has like 22 or something. Thousand stars.
Kazlan Fields
Wonderful. And you also mentioned at the beginning of the show the Day Zero 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 CFPS 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 migrational, let me say switch, it's just to switch from Terraform to Open toefl. Hearing about that from customers, enterprise companies using Open Tofu and one of the sessions I really liked in Kubecon about Open Tofu 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 infrastructure code that supports Terraform, Terragrant and open TOEFL and other frameworks and they've talked about Atlantis and Open TOEFL 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 Open Tofu. So Atlantis was a great session in Kubecon and if I just mentioned besides of your question about the event we see more and more both open source projects and vendors using Open Tofu, supporting Open Tofu, deprecating, removing support of Terraform and switching to Open Tofu and Atlantis is one that added support for Open Tofu. So just seeing this kind of adoption signals about the maturity of such a.
Kazlan Fields
Project 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 like 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, but I'll.
Kazlan Fields
Find out and we'll let you know in the chatter, please. And we'll have links to it if we're able to find links to those. Thank you but I look forward to seeing the schedule for this time.
Ohad Maislish
Yeah, we're working on it now, so stay tuned.
Kazlan Fields
Thank you for your work on that CFP and thank you for teaching me today about Open Tofu. If you're interested in learning more about how Open Tofu 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 Ohan, thank you so much.
Ohad Maislish
It was a pleasure.
Abdel Sikhiwar
Well, thank you Kaslin for that interview. I have been wanting to actually talk to somebody about opentofu for a while.
Kazlan Fields
Yeah, well I completed this interview. Abdel initiated it, so.
Abdel Sikhiwar
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 a 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 Open Tofu was quite a big deal at some point this year.
Kazlan Fields
Something that was interesting to me about this one is this is one of those CNCF projects that like, 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. And yet I have used something very similar, at least.
Abdel Sikhiwar
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 backward compatible with Terraform, which means you could write Terraform code and just still run it with the Open Tofu tool all the other way around. That kind of the understanding, I don't know. At that time when we chatted, Ohad was not sure how they will diverge in the future.
Kazlan Fields
Yeah, I did not ask about that.
Abdel Sikhiwar
Yeah, But I mean, to be very honest with you, and this is going to be on recording, so I have to be careful how I frame this. I was never a big fan of Terraform myself.
Kazlan Fields
Very careful.
Abdel Sikhiwar
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.
Kazlan 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. It's like you're putting your infrastructure into code, which I am very much all for.
Abdel Sikhiwar
So, yeah, I mean, I'm all for GitHubs, I'm just not. I much rather do it with other tools like Pulumi 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.
Kazlan Fields
I do think it's interesting how that space has kind of expanded, right?
Abdel Sikhiwar
Yeah, yeah. Because then Pulumi came out and then the whole kind of crossplane or km like the Kubernetes resource management way of doing things. So I would have to guess it's probably because there are people like me who doesn't want to use Terraform and we're looking for alternatives. That's just my assumption. Right.
Kazlan 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 Sikhiwar
Yeah, I mean I, that's how I started. Like, I mean there, there is probably some Bash script somewhere running that I wrote 10 years ago, so. Oh no, I'm sorry if you are listening to this and you're using it. But actually one thing, this was very interesting to me when I talked with Oha at the time and you chatted about this during the interview is so one thing I didn't know and one thing that was interesting, one of the things I didn't know is that Terraform themselves, they didn't really open up Terraform to community contributions up to very recently. Right.
Kazlan 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 like a year or something before they switched the license, then they weren't accepting any more community contributions the other way around.
Abdel Sikhiwar
Got it?
Kazlan Fields
Yeah, that's my understanding.
Abdel Sikhiwar
Okay. Okay. Okay, sure. Well that. Okay, that explains. Explains.
Kazlan Fields
Yeah, it makes it much, much more sense. Right, it does.
Abdel Sikhiwar
And then the other thing is the fact that when they released Open toefl, like one of the first things that they wanted to add was the most voted for feature in Terraform, like the state encryption.
Kazlan Fields
It makes sense.
Abdel Sikhiwar
It sounds like they really wanted to differentiate themselves like right out of the box.
Kazlan 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 that's actually a very good.
Abdel Sikhiwar
Way of looking at things. That's a very valid point. I just like that, okay, let's fork this thing and just implement the thing that people want the most. So. No, but it was pretty cool. Ohad is pretty knowledgeable and have been around for a while.
Kazlan Fields
Yeah, absolutely. And since you had kind of set this up and I hadn't really Talked to the M0 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.
Abdel Sikhiwar
Yeah, yeah, I know. He have been around for a while. He have been doing quite a lot of good stuff.
Kazlan Fields
And a fellow podcaster on top of it.
Abdel Sikhiwar
Yes, yes. The infrastructure as code podcast, which we need to find an excuse to be on, I guess.
Kazlan Fields
I don't know if I need to put more work on my own plate, but come on.
Abdel Sikhiwar
Video podcast is fun.
Kazlan Fields
It's true.
Abdel Sikhiwar
Get to talk to people.
Kazlan Fields
It is really fun. If you see us at kubecon, come say hi.
Abdel Sikhiwar
Yes, please. Yes.
Kazlan Fields
We'll be doing our mini interviews and we'll need folks to talk to.
Abdel Sikhiwar
Exactly. Yeah. And the other thing that was quite interesting so besides like, okay, the features and the releases and all that stuff is. Oh, had mentioned that. So 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 Open Tofu.
Kazlan Fields
Yeah, very interesting. I would like to read that.
Abdel Sikhiwar
I added the blog to the show notes, so it will include Ctrl 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 like, just people forking stuff because Valky and Open Tofu happened like not far away from each other, like as forks. And I think in the community there was this question of whether this is kind of an indicative of a trend. Is this going to happen more? Right. 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 and.
Kazlan Fields
Such is open source. Right. The spirit of open source is alive and well.
Abdel Sikhiwar
Exactly, exactly. Now I'm a big fan of the whole concept of like, all right, you change the license. We're just going to do our own thing.
Kazlan Fields
Yeah. If you want to, then I guess you can do that.
Abdel Sikhiwar
But yeah, yeah, yeah. So that's. I think it's. It's pretty cool.
Kazlan Fields
Yeah. And for folks who are interested in what Open Tofu is doing and want to get hands on. I like that Ohad mentioned that they have a day zero event at Kubecon North America and they had one at Kubecon EU as well. Day zero 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 so starts. The Kubecon schedule is of course, very varied. Even within a single track, you get a lot of different topics. So even if 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 like the host of that room. So it would be kind of like 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, like if you were the audience of that track, then that would work for you.
Abdel Sikhiwar
Yeah. And I mean, Open Tofu day, which is colochist event, is included in tickets for.
Kazlan Fields
Exactly. And now day zero 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 Sikhiwar
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 Open Tofu 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 looks like. I have some juicy details, so some behind the scene. Let's just put it this way.
Kazlan 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. Yes.
Abdel Sikhiwar
Yes. Awesome. Well, thank you very much, Kaslyn.
Kazlan Fields
Thank you, Abda. And thank you everyone for listening.
Abdel Sikhiwar
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 Kubernetespod or reach us by email at Kubernetespodcastgoogle.com you can also check out our website at Kubernetespodcast.com where you will find transcripts and show notes 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.
Kubernetes Podcast from Google - Episode Summary: "OpenTofu, with Ohad Maislish"
Release Date: August 6, 2024
In this episode of the Kubernetes Podcast from Google, hosts Abdel Sghiouar and Kaslin Fields delve into the evolving landscape of infrastructure as code (IaC) with a special focus on OpenTofu. The episode features an insightful conversation with Ohad Maislish, CEO and co-founder of Envzero, and a pivotal figure behind the OpenTofu project. Throughout the discussion, Abdel and Kaslin explore the origins, development, and future prospects of OpenTofu within the Kubernetes and broader cloud-native ecosystems.
Before diving into the guest interview, Abdel and Kaslin share the latest updates from the Kubernetes community:
Kubernetes Version 1.31 Removals and Major Changes
GKE Extended Support
Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) Update
Microsoft Azure Container Storage
Cloud Native Glossary in Turkish
Kaslin (02:31) warmly welcomes Ohad Maislish to the show, highlighting his dual roles:
Ohad (02:57): "I'm one of the co-founders of the famous Open Source project and a new Open Source project less than a year named OpenTofu, backed by the Linux Foundation."
Kaslin (07:21) prompts Ohad to elaborate on OpenTofu.
Ohad (07:32) outlines the genesis of OpenTofu:
Ohad (08:22): "OpenTofu is 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 (04:26) seeks clarity on OpenTofu's association with the Linux Foundation and CNCF.
Ohad (04:27) explains:
Ohad (05:25): "Linux foundation is a very big foundation and has several sub-foundations. The most known obviously is the CNCF, but it's not the only one."
Kaslin (10:44) inquires about the support OpenTofu has garnered.
Ohad (11:14) details the backing:
Ohad (11:14): "We have full-time employees that do nothing but coding, OpenTofu and Code and Pull request."
Kaslin (12:43) asks about OpenTofu's maturity and recent releases.
Ohad (13:45) provides a roadmap:
Ohad (13:59): "OpenTofu 1.7 includes the long awaited state encryption... we just released the Release candidate for 1.8."
Kaslin (16:54) inquires about user adoption.
Ohad (17:08) shares encouraging metrics:
Ohad (18:35): "We have great developers from the community that contribute code on a daily basis... user adoption is growing."
Kaslin (20:23) explores the project's governance.
Ohad (22:27) emphasizes:
Ohad (22:27): "We would not be where we are if it wasn't for them [Linux Foundation and Gruntwork]."
Kaslin (24:07) asks how listeners can contribute or learn more.
Ohad (24:39) provides resources:
Ohad (24:39): "opentofu.org, the Slack workspace and definitely the GitHub project that I didn't mention but I think already has like 22 or something. Thousand stars."
Kaslin (25:26) inquires about OpenTofu's involvement in Kubecon events.
Ohad (25:46) highlights:
Ohad (26:54): "Atlantis was a great session in Kubecon and... other projects start supporting OpenTofu."
Kaslin (27:39) asks about forthcoming features and project trajectory.
Ohad (20:23) states:
Ohad (20:23): "We have an open discussion about the requests... it's like a baby that grew into, I don't know, a man or a woman and now walking, talking thing."
After the interview, Abdel and Kaslin share their personal viewpoints:
Abdel's Perspective:
Kaslin's Thoughts:
Discussion on Open Source Forks:
The episode underscores the dynamic nature of the infrastructure as code landscape, highlighting OpenTofu as a robust, community-driven alternative to Terraform. Ohad Maislish's insights reveal a project poised for significant growth, supported by both corporate backing and a passionate open-source community. Listeners interested in contributing or learning more are encouraged to visit opentofu.org, join the Slack workspace, or explore the GitHub repository. Additionally, upcoming OpenTofu Day events at Kubecon offer opportunities for deeper engagement and learning.
Kaslin (38:08) wraps up: "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."
Ohad (07:32): "OpenTofu is a fork of the Terraform project and it continues to have its own features with compatibility or almost full compatibility with the Terraform project."
Ohad (11:14): "We have full-time employees that do nothing but coding, OpenTofu and Code and Pull request."
Ohad (13:45): "OpenTofu 1.7 includes the long awaited state encryption... we just released the Release candidate for 1.8."
Ohad (17:08): "We see that the community really really wants to influence the architecture or the future of that project."
Ohad (22:27): "We would not be where we are if it wasn't for [Linux Foundation and Gruntwork]."
For more detailed discussions and updates, listeners are encouraged to visit the podcast's official website at kubernetespodcast.com and follow the hosts on Twitter @KubernetesPod.