Exec: Key new HashiCorp Terraform feature enabled by BSL

HashiCorp Terraform infrastructure-as-code management just got easier, company officials said, attributing the product's recent development in part to funding from its controversial new Business Source License.

Terraform Stacks, released this week in private preview for all editions of Terraform, simplifies large-scale infrastructure-as-code deployments by allowing multiple Terraform modules and workspaces to be updated at the same time from a centralized interface. In the past, updates had to be made individually for separate modules, which often required cutting and pasting code between interdependent Terraform configurations in the correct order, a complex and error-prone process.

Terraform Stacks will be a part of the free Community Edition that replaces the open source version of the tool under HashiCorp's new Business Source License as well as the Cloud and Enterprise editions, said Meghan Liese, vice president of product marketing at HashiCorp.

"These are major enhancements to the execution engine that are being asked [for] from the community. … That's really what we're focused on now," Liese said. "Our move to BSL is really about the investment that allows us to put these types of innovations back into HashiCorp and toward a future that supports both the community and commercial offerings."

Terraform has been at the epicenter of controversy following the BSL change, with a Linux Foundation project, OpenTofu, now forking the open source code and Terraform Registry as a direct response.

Liese declined to comment on OpenTofu specifically but said Terraform's community remains strong and indicated the company has no intention of backing down from its BSL strategy.

"The move to a community version is really about serving … just under 50,000 members across 173 HashiCorp user groups in 71 countries; 38,000 individuals who are HashiCorp cloud engineers and certified on TerraForm, Vault and Consul; and the ecosystem of over 900 partners," she said. "That's who we listen to."

One Terraform Community Edition user said that while he had yet to test Stacks directly, such a feature has long been on his wish list for the product.

"The one piece that was really missing was the ability to hand [Terraform modules] to a developer and say, 'Go spin up a couple of environments if you want to test new features and then kill them when you're done,'" said Rob Lazzurs, director of technology at Amach Software, a digital transformation consultancy in Dublin, Ireland. "[Stacks is] going to solve that problem for us, I believe."

Amach is listed as a supporter of OpenTofu, but neither the company nor any of its clients have plans to move away from the HashiCorp version, Lazzurs said.

"Our position as a consultancy [is] to recommend HashiCorp by default but also publicly make it clear we will support clients who use the fork," he said. "We expect all of our existing clients to stick with Terraform in both the short- and medium-term."