HashiCorp released Terraform 1.4 in March 2023 with improvements to test infrastructure and the checks feature. The broader story is what the IaC landscape looks like as Terraform consolidates its position.
Terraform test blocks
Terraform 1.4 introduced a native test infrastructure with test files and a terraform test command. Previously, testing Terraform configurations required third-party tools (Terratest, kitchen-terraform). Native test support means you can write assertions about your infrastructure in HCL, the Terraform configuration language, without introducing a separate testing framework. The current capability is basic, but the direction toward infrastructure-as-code testing as a first-class concern is the right one.
Pulumi as the typed alternative
Pulumi lets you define infrastructure in TypeScript, Python, Go, or C# rather than HCL. For teams that already have strong programming language expertise, Pulumi's type system, IDE support, and ability to use standard testing frameworks for infrastructure tests are meaningful advantages over HCL. The tradeoff is a smaller ecosystem and less community documentation. Pulumi has grown significantly in 2022-2023 but Terraform's ecosystem advantage is substantial.
OpenTofu: the open source fork
HashiCorp changed Terraform's licence from open source (Mozilla Public License) to Business Source Licence (BSL) in August 2023. The BSL prevents use of Terraform to build competing managed services. The OpenTofu project, a fork of Terraform under the Linux Foundation, was created in response. For organisations using Terraform with cloud providers' native backends (AWS, Azure, GCP state storage), the licence change has no immediate impact. For Terraform Cloud competitors, it does.
The Bicep vs Terraform question for Azure
For Azure-only infrastructure, Azure Bicep is a compelling alternative to Terraform: first-class Azure provider support, ARM template output, and native integration with the Azure CLI and Azure DevOps. For multi-cloud infrastructure or teams that want a single IaC tool across cloud providers, Terraform (or OpenTofu) remains the standard. The decision is architectural: single-cloud discipline vs multi-cloud flexibility.