Last Updated on December 22, 2025 by Arnav Sharma
Look, I’ll level with you. We just wrapped up an entire blog series imagining what HashiConf 2025 might look like. Stacks going GA, Terraform Actions, advanced search capabilities, AI agents powered by MCP, Infragraph visualizations… honestly, it felt pretty convincing while I was writing it.
But now it’s time to switch gears. Let’s talk about what’s actually shipping and trending in the Terraform ecosystem today, particularly after IBM closed its HashiCorp acquisition back in February 2025.
What’s Really Hot Right Now
Terraform Stacks Has Actually Gone GA
Here’s the thing: I wasn’t making this one up in our fictional series. Stacks is real, and it’s here.
HashiCorp announced it as “Terraform 2.0” at HashiConf 2024, and it hit general availability in 2025. If you’ve ever battled with managing multiple environments or regions, you know the pain. Teams have been wrapping Terraform in tools like Terragrunt for years just to get basic orchestration working.
Stacks changes that. You get native multi-environment and multi-region orchestration built right in. No more wrapper scripts. No more custom tooling. Just components and deployments defined in HCL, with automatic dependency graphs and deployment groups.
There’s a catch though. Stacks is exclusive to HCP Terraform (the Plus and Enterprise tiers). You won’t find it in the open-source CLI or OpenTofu. But if you’re already on HCP, this feature alone is why most teams are finally pulling the trigger on upgrading.
Day 2 Operations Get First-Class Support with Terraform Actions
This one’s in public preview right now, and it’s solving a problem that’s bugged infrastructure teams forever.
You know those imperative tasks that don’t quite fit into the declarative Terraform model? Scaling operations, security patching, certificate rotation… all that fun stuff. Actions lets you codify these tasks directly in HCL.
The real headline here is the deep integration with Red Hat Ansible. You can actually run Ansible playbooks from Terraform now. Set up triggers for post-apply workflows, drift remediation, scheduled maintenance, or manual interventions.
It’s shipping in HCP Terraform, and the Ansible connection is getting serious attention in enterprise circles. Makes sense when you think about it: infrastructure provisioning meets configuration management in one workflow.
Terraform Search and Bulk Import Finally Arrive
Remember spending days (or weeks) trying to figure out who owns a particular resource? Or which team last touched that mystery EC2 instance?
Those days might finally be over. Real-time search across your entire infrastructure estate is now a thing, plus you can bulk import resources with simple one-liners.
Under the hood, this is powered by the new Infragraph engine that’s been quietly rolling out. It’s one of those features that doesn’t sound sexy until you actually need it, and then you wonder how you ever lived without it.
AI-Powered Terraform Through MCP
Model Control Plane (MCP) integration isn’t fully GA yet, but it’s in advanced preview. Here’s what it does: tools like GitHub Copilot or Claude can read your Terraform state, generate plans, and even open pull requests. Securely.
The key word there is “securely.” Your cloud credentials never touch the LLM. Everything runs through guarded execution paths. I’ve seen early demos, and it’s genuinely impressive how well it handles common infrastructure patterns.
The IBM and Red Hat Factor
Since the acquisition closed, we’re seeing some predictable (but welcome) integrations heating up:
Terraform plays nicer with Ansible Automation Platform for true end-to-end infrastructure-as-code plus configuration management. Vault integrates more deeply with Red Hat OpenShift for secrets handling. There’s even Terraform support coming for IBM Z mainframes, which I honestly didn’t see coming.
And apparently deeper watsonx AI integrations are planned for 2026. We’ll see how that plays out.
OpenTofu Keeps Building Momentum
While HashiCorp (now IBM) pushes forward with HCP-exclusive features, OpenTofu isn’t standing still.
Version 1.8 and beyond brought provider-defined functions, encrypted state at rest, and generally faster feature development. A lot of teams are either sticking with OpenTofu or actively migrating to it, especially when paired with Terragrunt or Terramate for stack-like workflows.
The best part? Compatibility remains excellent. In most cases, you can switch between Terraform and OpenTofu with minimal code changes. It’s refreshing to have options.
What’s New in the Terraform CLI
The latest stable release is Terraform 1.9.x, with 1.10+ already in alpha testing.
Some of the cooler additions:
- Ephemeral resources and values mean you can finally keep secrets out of your state file. This has been a pain point for years.
- Enhanced variable validation that can reference other variables and data sources. Makes your validation logic way more powerful.
- New templatestring function and the addition of remove and destroy provisioners for better resource lifecycle management.
Nothing earth-shattering on its own, but these features add up to a significantly better developer experience.
So What Should You Actually Use?
It depends on where you sit.
- If you’re a large enterprise, especially one already in the IBM or Red Hat ecosystem, HCP Terraform with Stacks and Actions makes a lot of sense. You get native scale, the Ansible synergy actually works, and you have IBM support backing it all up.
- If you’re an open-source purist or just want to avoid vendor lock-in on features, OpenTofu paired with Terragrunt or Terramate gives you the full MPL license and often faster community-driven features.
- If you’re somewhere in the middle or thinking about migrating, here’s some good news: the configurations are about 99% compatible between Terraform and OpenTofu. You can hedge your bets and keep your options open.
The Bottom Line
That fictional future I painted in the blog series? It’s basically happening. Just a bit slower and more enterprise-focused than keynote demos usually suggest.
The Terraform ecosystem is healthy and evolving in multiple directions at once. HCP Terraform is pushing the enterprise envelope with Stacks and Actions. OpenTofu is keeping the community flame alive and innovating in the open. And the core CLI keeps getting better regardless of which fork you choose.
Not a bad place to be, honestly.
So what do you want to dig into next? I could write a real, no-hype guide to migrating to Stacks today. Or maybe a side-by-side comparison of OpenTofu 1.8 versus Terraform 1.9. Or something completely different.
Your call. What’s next?