DevOps

Top Infrastructure as Code (IaC) tools for 2025

December 24, 2024
10 min READ

Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is a gold standard in modern infrastructure provisioning. Popular among software development teams of all sizes, it has made previously difficult, tedious, and cumbersome tasks easy to collaborate on and simple to automate. This reduces the effort needed to implement infrastructure, cutting the time required from days to minutes.

The widespread adoption of IaC led to the creation of an ecosystem of tools to help deliver and manage Infrastructure as Code at scale.

In this article, we’ll discuss the best Infrastructure as Code tools for 2025 and help you pick the right one(s) for your needs.

Terraform

Terraform is a widely popular IaC tool thanks to its incredibly vast library of providers, which abstract external APIs. Its declarative approach supports provisioning infrastructure from all major clouds, including AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure, along with numerous other services and platforms.

Terraform supports immutable infrastructure by enabling resources to be replaced rather than updated when changes are made. By defining infrastructure as code, Terraform ensures any modification results in the destruction and recreation of resources, maintaining consistency and minimizing configuration drift. This approach enhances reliability, predictability, and reduces deployment risks.

From DNS, secrets management, and monitoring to version control system providers, you can use Terraform to pre-configure and provision infrastructure from scratch. Developers can declare their desired infrastructure configuration in either its native syntax, HCL, or in a programming language they already know, such as Typescript, Python, Java, C#, or Go, through its Cloud Development Kit.

Besides built-in syntax validation, Terraform also allows you to preview the impact of your code changes before they are applied to the infrastructure resources. This way, you can double-check everything, prevent mistakes, and by extension, avoid unnecessary costs.

Terraform is flexible, easy to use, and incredibly powerful, with an extensive ecosystem of useful third-party tools around it. Both beginner and experienced engineers will find it a good choice.

OpenTofu

In August 2023, HashiCorp, the company behind Terraform, made changes to the Terraform license, resulting in the loss of its open-source status. This sparked a heated debate over the direction in which Terraform–the leading tool for infrastructure management–was heading , leading to the creation of a fork initially called OpenTF and later renamed to OpenTofu.

OpenTofu also uses a declarative approach to support immutable infrastructure. Changes are applied by replacing resources rather than modifying them in place, ensuring consistent, predictable environments. This approach minimizes configuration drift, enhances reliability, and simplifies rollback, making infrastructure easier to manage and maintain across diverse deployment scenarios.

OpenTofu provides the same features Terraform offers but is committed to remaining open source, with changes made based on the voice of its users. This is especially important for experienced engineers, who are often frustrated with Terraform’s quirks and missing features that have never been properly addressed since its launch.

OpenTofu is an open-source alternative to Terraform for those looking for a reliable, powerful tool with a passionate community behind it.

CloudFormation

CloudFormation is an IaC service designed to simplify resource management and configuration management. Its syntax can be based either on YAML or JSON, although the former is generally more readable.

Unfortunately, it has its drawbacks in a few key areas when compared to Terraform and OpenTofu. The syntax is much more explicit, and dynamic resource declarations aren’t possible out of the box, so the code can get messy, especially when you need a few instances of the same type of resource.

CloudFormation also only supports cloud infrastructure deployed via AWS. In addition, unlike Terraform and OpenTofu, it isn’t free to use, although its cost isn’t very steep.

On the other hand, CloudFormation does have its benefits. There is no state to manage, the documentation is well maintained, and customers enrolled with AWS Enterprise Support can receive assistance directly from AWS.

CloudFormation is a solid choice for engineers working strictly with AWS who need IaC tools to carry out simple, constrained workloads. If you’re looking for a quick and easily repeatable way of handling AWS resources across multiple environments and regions without too many tools to fit on your belt, CloudFormation might be for you.

Ansible

Ansible is an open-source solution that allows you to automate tedious management tasks on Windows and Linux machines, such as installing or upgrading software, editing configuration files, or applying patches, at scale.

It uses a declarative approach, meaning that instead of step-by-step instructions, your code is a reflection of the final state you want your infrastructure to match. You can also easily reuse this code later, targeting different hosts, which saves a lot of time and preparation. In addition, Ansible emphasizes the principle of idempotency: that repeated execution of the same code should deliver the same results, avoiding unnecessary repetitions if the result has already been achieved.

In contrast to its competitors, Ansible has a relatively low entry bar, thanks to its YAML-based syntax, user-friendly design, agentless approach, and wide selection of freely available, pre-made code.

Combined with Terraform or OpenTofu, Ansible is an extremely helpful addition to your arsenal, both for configuring the infrastructure provisioned by those two solutions and for automating regular day-to-day tasks required to keep your infrastructure healthy.

Terragrunt

Terragrunt is a wrapper for Terraform/OpenTofu and is mainly focused on making your HCL cleaner, structurally simpler, and less repetitive.

It provides some useful features that extend the capabilities of both Terraform and OpenTofu. These include hooks for running custom code or scripts before or after the main tool runs, error hooks to catch exceptions and handle them on the spot, and support for applying changes to multiple separately defined environments with a single command.

In addition, it can also manage dependencies, dynamically declare state backends with values sourced from variables or files, and automatically run certain initialization commands for you.

Terragrunt is quite useful for all Terraform/OpenTofu-based infrastructure projects. However, it’s especially beneficial for bigger, multi-environment, multi-module configurations where clean, consistent code devoid of repetitions is crucial for efficient maintenance.

Helm

Kubernetes is a very powerful and extensive orchestration system, but it’s also quite complex. For example, manually launching applications on a cluster becomes unfeasible very quickly, especially as they grow in numbers. Helm makes Kubernetes application lifecycle management much less cumbersome, serving as a package manager for K8s manifests.

Helm packages, called charts, are easy to version, distribute, and reuse. In addition, they can be combined, allowing you to create a single large and intricate deployment from smaller, manageable elements. Versioning and rollback capabilities also let you quickly recover from failed deployments and correct the errors that caused them, without lengthy service interruptions.

The thriving community around Helm maintains a rich library of charts and numerous tools that extend its capabilities. Some of these solutions, like ArgoCD, have proven to be real game-changers, offering self-healing, multi-cluster automated application deployment, an easy-to-use graphical interface, and much more.

Helm is immensely useful for any project based on Kubernetes. Nowadays, it’s hard to imagine operating a typical cluster without it.

Quali Torque

Quali Torque is a self-service platform that makes it easier to create and provision infrastructure, while also eliminating manual configuration and other tasks related to managing infrastructure.

Torque users can automatically generate IaC files defining resource configurations discovered via their public cloud accounts. This automates the infrastructure setup, eliminating the learning curve so more teams can evolve from traditional ClickOps to an IaC model, while also enabling advanced teams to capture and codify the state of their cloud environments to add to their repositories.

With Torque, you won’t have to choose between giving out sensitive cloud service provider credentials or forcing the development team to master separate, dedicated tools just to cover their own needs.

When users need to build environments, Torque leverages all infrastructure resources–including the IaC files created by the tool and those in the user’s existing repositories–to automate the orchestration of infrastructure components into reusable Environment as Code blueprints. Using Torque’s generative AI tools, users can simply describe the environment they need and Torque will automatically generate the configuration file defining that environment as code. This EaC file enables users to launch application environments quickly and easily, and eliminates the need to orchestrate environments every time they’re needed.

Torque also provides developers and other end users a self-service catalog to provision infrastructure as well as EaC blueprints on-demand. This experience eliminates the need to enter security credentials, variables, tags, and other complex inputs so developers can quickly run the resources they need in just a few clicks.

Once live, Torque supports Day-2 operations in a number of ways:

  • Defining complex Day-2 actions—like security validation, load balancing, or environment healthchecks—as code so users can execute them quickly and easily on demand
  • Automating the execution of Day-2 actions based on custom triggers, including recurring schedules (e.g. daily or weekly) and in response to specific events—eliminating the risk of human error to ensure these actions are carried out consistently
  • Providing visibility to understand how any resource defined via IaC is in use among the team’s environments so users can commit ad hoc updates to infrastructure code without disrupting their teammates

Torque’s visibility and reporting provide vital information that can be more difficult to gather using traditional IaC automation tools, including who is using which IaC resources at any given time, how much they cost, and how they perform.

Torque can help with governance and compliance as well. Operators can deny provisioning if a resource does not comply with established policies, i.e., poses security risks, violates regulatory compliance, or exceeds the budget; it also allows operators to detect and quickly address unwanted configuration drifts.

Together, this approach streamlines implementing IaC for organizations with limited IaC resources, while also enabling more advanced organizations to evolve to the EaC approach for building and scaling environments.

Summary

The selection of IaC tools is enormous and may, at first, be overwhelming. Our coverage of the top selections and the best use cases for their implementation should help make your choice easier.

Still, even the best tools might need a bit of help to fully solve all your infrastructure needs, especially at scale. That’s where orchestration platforms like Quali Torque can considerably improve your IaC experience, reducing the effort required and providing valuable assistance in deploying new projects, as well as maintaining already existing ones.

If you’d like to learn more about Quali Torque and how it can help you deliver infrastructure faster and more efficiently, schedule a free demo today.