OpenTofu

Open-source project that is a fork of Terraform. Designed to manage cloud provider resources

History

2024: Open Source project to manage cloud resources removed profiles of Russian providers and closed access from Russia

The open source project OpenTofu, which is an alternative to commercial Terraform products, at the end of August announced the removal of profiles for Russian cloud providers Cloud (formerly SberCloud), Yandex Cloud and Rustack Cloud Platform, and also blocked access to the registry.opentofu.org repository from Russian IP addresses. The Linux Foundation, under whose auspices the project is developing, announced that the changes are related to the implementation of measures to comply with US sanctions regarding the ban on the provision of services to Russian users. The decision was made unanimously by all 5 participants in the project's governing council in order to avoid legal prosecution of the hoster where the repository is located.

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OpenTofu

The OpenTofu project has blocked the register of modules that Russian cloud providers used to connect to the open configuration management platform and automate the maintenance of Terraform infrastructure, "said TAdviser, Grigory Sizonenko CEO of JSC". " IVC- Now access to the registry is impossible not only from Russian IP addresses, but also from any others. That is, it is impossible to bypass restrictions using VPN.

The OpenTofu project is designed to automate the management of cloud resources of various cloud operators using the Infrastructure-as-a-Code (IaaC) methodology. He himself is a fork (free copy) of the original Terraform project developed by HashiCorp. However, the latter closed the project in 2023 and changed the license for commercial BSL 1.1, so 147 companies and 734 individual developers announced the creation of their own open-source project under the auspices of the Linux Foundation. This is how OpenTofu appeared, which began to distribute the software under a MPLv2 license. However, in August 2024, it was discovered that this form of the project is not free, and must follow the requirements of the American government due to the American jurisdiction of the Linux Foundation.

Services provided as part of projects using free software may well fall under the definition of "providing commercial services," which the United States uses to impose sanctions, "Alexey Smirnov, chairman of the board of directors of BASEALT, explained to TAdviser. - Free licenses may allow programs to be used for commercial purposes. In addition, not only organizations that provide commercial services as such, but also organizations that provide any services that can be used for commercial purposes are subject to sanctions. The activities of Russian cloud service providers YandexCloud, SberCloud, Rustack belong to these categories.

As a result, US actions again threaten the freedom to copy and develop codes that were embedded in Richard Stolman's ideology called "copyleft." He built a software development system in which everyone who distributes the program both with and without changes would not have the right to restrict the freedom of its further distribution or modification. Five members of the governing council of the OpenTofu project who voted to restrict the freedom of distribution of code in a single territory clearly violated this principle.

In 2023, Terraform introduced a licensing system for its new versions, "Stanislav Bratchikov, product manager at Linx Cloud, said in a dialogue with TAdviser. - Therefore, it has become easier for companies to use OpenTofu, which is completely identical to the new versions of Terraform, but does not require royalties. So far, a smaller part of companies use OpenTofu in Russia - about 20%. Those who need to use the advanced functionality of the tool without encumbrance in the form of royalties for new versions. The rest of the organizations, mainly business from the corporate segment, use older versions of Terraform. These companies have enough of them to support infrastructure.

According to Stanislav Bratchikov, now the only Russian analogue of OpenTofu is Yandex's solution. At the same time, the Yandex press service responded to the TAdviser request as follows: "The removal of the Yandex Cloud provider in OpenTofu did not affect the performance and stability of the cloud platform." This is understandable - the clouds both worked and continued to work. But the convenience of using them on the part of customers could well be influenced. True, Yandex, as mentioned above, is promoting its own management tool as an alternative to OpenTofu. However, this is more like linking to a single provider, as OpenTofu has modules for managing various cloud providers.

It should be noted that the OpenTofu project did not close the source codes of the product, they are still available to developers around the world, including Russian ones, - said Alexey Smirnov. - Among other things, the codes of the modules required by Russian cloud providers to connect to Terraform are also open. Russian organizations can create a fork of the registry.opentofu.org repository, place the necessary modules in it and continue to work. This repository will not be supported by the OpenTofu project, but will not interrupt the work of Russian services.

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