HashiCorp released Terraform 1.0 in June 2021. The 1.0 designation signals API and workflow stability, not new features. For organisations that have built their infrastructure automation on Terraform, the 1.0 release is a meaningful maturity milestone.
What changed at 1.0
The 1.0 release commits to backwards compatibility within the 1.x series, establishes a stable upgrade path, and formalises the state file format guarantees. The workflow and core HCL syntax that organisations have been using since 0.12 is now officially stable. The 1.0 release also improved the plan output readability and fixed long-standing bugs in the refresh behaviour.
The provider ecosystem
Terraform's value comes from its provider ecosystem: the AWS, Azure, GCP, Kubernetes, and thousands of other providers that translate HCL resources into API calls. The provider SDK matured significantly through 2020-2021 and the official cloud providers are now well-maintained and broadly feature-complete for the major services. The quality and maintainability gap between official and community providers remains.
Remote state and Terraform Cloud
The recommended state management for team use is Terraform Cloud (free tier available) or a self-managed remote backend (S3 + DynamoDB for state locking is the AWS pattern). Local state files in version control are not acceptable for team workflows, they produce state conflicts and do not provide the locking that prevents simultaneous applies. The 1.0 release made the Terraform Cloud integration actually work well.
Competing approaches
Pulumi (launched 2018) uses general-purpose languages (TypeScript, Python, Go, C#) instead of HCL, which appeals to developers who prefer type-safe infrastructure code. CDK for Terraform (CDKtf) allows Terraform providers to be consumed from TypeScript or Python with generated constructs. The HCL vs real programming language debate is ongoing but Terraform's market share and ecosystem depth keep it dominant.