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Infrastructure as code has come a long way. What started as a breakthrough in cloud provisioning has now become a standard part of how teams build and manage modern applications.
But as development practices have matured, expectations around infrastructure have shifted. Today, we’re not just defining cloud resources; we’re orchestrating fast, automated, and dynamic environments that match the speed of software delivery.
It’s a good time to ask: Are the tools we’ve used still the right ones?
Terraform’s role in the early days
As we rethink infrastructure as code in 2025, it’s natural to revisit the tools that defined its early adoption – and Terraform is at the top of that list. When it first became popular, it introduced a new way of thinking about infrastructure. It let teams describe their environments in code, track changes in version control, and apply updates in a controlled, repeatable way. At a time when most infrastructure was long-lived and manually managed, this was a major improvement.
Teams could use Terraform to build production systems with confidence. It worked well for environments that changed slowly, were managed by dedicated ops teams, and followed careful planning and review processes.
The way we work has changed
Today, software moves faster. Developers deploy code more often, infrastructure is spun up and torn down as part of test pipelines, and different teams contribute to the same codebase. Changes are no longer occasional; they’re constant. That shift has put pressure on tools that weren’t built with this kind of speed and flexibility in mind.
Terraform can still handle these cases, but it often needs extra tooling and a lot of coordination. Managing shared state, writing wrapper scripts, and organizing modules across environments takes time. It works, but it can be heavy. And when you’re moving fast, that weight starts to matter.
The new reality of software delivery demands infrastructure that fits directly into automated workflows. Instead of provisioning being a separate task, it’s part of every commit, every pull request, and every deployment.
This has led to new expectations. Teams want infrastructure changes to be easy to review, easy to test, and easy to track. They want developers and operations to be able to contribute without deep knowledge of tooling. And they want infrastructure to follow the same principles as their application code: fast feedback, versioned history, and safe automation.
A quiet shift toward already existing solutions
In response, existing solutions have been around for a long time that still follow the core ideas of infrastructure as code, but with different priorities. Instead of being dependent on state files and extensive tooling, they are often enough to fulfill the needs of modern infrastructure deployments. We are discussing cloud-provider SDKs and command-line interfaces (CLIs).
These tools offer first-class feature access without the Terraform delay. And they give you finer control and custom logic through programmatic control and additional conditional logic, which is sometimes cumbersome or verbose in Terraform.
Often, the approach to implementing small-scale tasks leads to easier maintainability, faster execution, more predictable deployments, and less stress for the teams involved.
Last but not least, it reduces abstraction overhead; native tools do exactly what the API says, no translation or misalignment.
We could still say that with Terraform, you have one language that you have to learn to automate your entire infrastructure deployment on different platforms, but although you are using only one language, you still have to adjust all resource definitions to the cloud-specific parameters. So, why not use platform-specific tools directly from the start?
Evolving with the times
Terraform still works well for many teams, especially if you’ve been using it for a while and have set up processes around it. But if you’re finding it’s slowing you down or not fitting with the pace of today’s development, it might be time to look at newer tools that fit better with how things work now.
The goal isn’t to get rid of what works, but to find tools that grow with your team’s needs. As the world of infrastructure changes, solutions will change too. For example, XOAP is one of the new generation solutions built for fast-paced development (and no extra complexity). You can see how it works for free, just click the “Start for free” button below!
