The future of Terraform CDK
by mfornasa on 12/10/2025, 7:14:03 PM
https://github.com/hashicorp/terraform-cdk
Comments
by: vbernat
It's odd to always say "Hashicorp, an IBM company". Looks like they want to assign blame.<p>I did try Pulumi a while back, but the compatibility with Terraform modules was not great, so I've switched to CDKTF, which can handle unmodified modules. Dunno if I'll switch back to Pulumi or just use OpenTofu directly.
12/10/2025, 7:20:33 PM
by: crimsonnoodle58
This is particularly frustrating as I've spent the last year writing many thousands of lines of CDKTF Python.<p>HCL just does not have the modularity and expressiveness that Python, or other languages CDKTF supports.<p>I guess I'll spend another year migrating to Pulumi now..
12/10/2025, 8:14:20 PM
by: kennu
Sad to see it go. The philosophy of CDK has been to offer a shared ecosystem between IaC, backend code and frontend code, allowing to share configuration, data structures and libraries between all of them. It has made development more unified and have less redundancy and manual work. Personally I don't want to repeat some stuff in a special Terraform language, if I can find a way to manage the whole application in TypeScript.
12/11/2025, 11:13:12 AM
by: vanschelven
"Will be sunset on Dec 10"... commit date: Dec 10.<p>That seems like rather short notice.
12/10/2025, 8:34:46 PM
by: mfornasa
Rug pulls on infrastructure components seem even worse than other rug pulls as they can hit your entire infra codebase at once
12/10/2025, 7:53:51 PM
by: GardenLetter27
Damn, what are the best alternatives here? For pure AWS I guess CDK directly is okay, but locks you in.
12/10/2025, 7:32:02 PM
by: deadfece
At least they gave us some notice, that’s much appreciated.
12/10/2025, 7:59:18 PM
by: NeckBeardPrince
Hashicorp, an IBM company
12/10/2025, 8:04:32 PM
by: zer0-c00l
This is a bummer. I don't particularly like Pulumi but use it anyways because for my use cases being able to write actual code is really impactful. Sucks to see fewer options in that space
12/10/2025, 7:32:20 PM
by: Havoc
As far as corporate mercy killings goes archived under mozilla license is better than a pivot to "you now pay per core" or whatever
12/11/2025, 12:43:08 AM
by: moltar
This is so sad. It’s a great project. Needs to be forked and maintained. If anyone forks please email me I’ll contribute.
12/10/2025, 8:58:38 PM
by: callumgare
As an alternative is anyone considering <a href="https://sst.dev/">https://sst.dev/</a> (which uses Pulumi under the hood)? We use it at work and I’ve been quite happy with it
12/10/2025, 8:56:37 PM
by: dev_l1x_be
It would be great to have an alternative to Terraform that uses a bit more advanced provider (at last for AWS). Does OpenTofu use that same provider?
12/10/2025, 7:59:38 PM
by: kbar13
we're using cdk since 100% of our stuff is in aws but will soon need to hook up some external resources like cloudflare. looked at tfcdk a while back but didn't think it was a good idea (glad). still trying to figure out a good way forward and hoping it's not to rip the bandaid and migrate everything to terraform / pulumi
12/10/2025, 8:32:20 PM
by: yearolinuxdsktp
That’s a real shame. It seems like Pulumi is the only alternative for internal DSLs for IaaC? I always found HCL to be quite terrible, slowly becoming less painful, but not really refactoring-friendly.<p>Terraform CDK had promise as a blessed infrastructure-as-actual-code solution from the official maintainer of Terraform, so easier to sell internally rather than something from a new vendor like Pulumi. I feel sorry for those teams who have migrated to TF CDK.<p>Internal vs external DSLs explained in the middle of this page: <a href="https://martinfowler.com/bliki/DslQandA.html" rel="nofollow">https://martinfowler.com/bliki/DslQandA.html</a>
12/10/2025, 7:39:33 PM
by: borisbanjo
CDKTF works beautifully, all the complains here seem to be from salty devops who got pissed the developers wanted something more powerful than the garbage HCL with its even more garbage module system.<p>CDKTF stacks are great and the construct pattern gives you modularization without all the baggage.
12/10/2025, 11:42:21 PM
by: DangitBobby
Well that sucks for me.
12/10/2025, 11:12:42 PM
by: lijok
Good move. They clearly didn't have the resources they needed. The design of the CDKs was atrocious.
12/10/2025, 8:19:03 PM
by: lloydatkinson
What was the point of it? Terraform supports AWS anyway.
12/10/2025, 8:13:22 PM