KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026: Join the cloud native community at OpenTofu Day

Most of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon assumes the cluster already exists. OpenTofu Day covers everything that has to be provisioned before and around it: cloud accounts, networking, managed services, and the clusters themselves.

On November 9, OpenTofu Day returns to Salt Lake City as a co-located event at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026. It is a single-track day. OpenTofu’s core maintainers are in the room from start to finish, and teams running OpenTofu in production share what they’ve learned.

Why now

Licensing changes, consolidation, and shifting commercial models have led many organizations to reexamine the tooling their infrastructure depends on. Many now prefer projects governed by their communities. OpenTofu has grown from a fork into a CNCF Sandbox project with more than 10 million downloads as of October 2026. Recent releases have added capabilities of its own, including client-side state encryption, for_each on provider configurations, and OCI registry support.

For most teams, switching the CLI is the easy part: OpenTofu is designed as a drop-in replacement for Terraform. The bigger decision is what happens to everything around it, meaning the pipelines, state management, policy, and access controls through which infrastructure changes are made. Platform engineers generally choose between two paths. They can keep their existing workflows and swap the engine underneath with minimal disruption, or they can use the migration as an opportunity to re-platform and redesign how infrastructure changes are delivered. Each path has real trade-offs in risk, effort, and long-term flexibility, and the right choice depends on the organization.

Hearing from teams that have taken each path is one of the most useful things OpenTofu Day offers, and it is where that experience gets shared openly.

Back in Salt Lake City

OpenTofu Day debuted as a CNCF-hosted co-located event at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe 2024 in Paris, about two months after the project’s first stable release. It has been held at every KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe and North America since then, in Salt Lake City, London, Atlanta, and Amsterdam, often to near-capacity rooms.

The event began in the months after Terraform’s 2023 license change, when the community built around it had no vendor-neutral place to meet. That is still its purpose. Maintainers and production users meet face to face, migration lessons are shared openly, and the people running the project at scale help shape its roadmap.

“What’s changed since OpenTofu Day Paris are the questions. In 2024 people asked whether they should migrate, and how. Now they ask how others have scaled it, instrumented it, and built platforms on it.” — Sebastian Stadil, OpenTofu Day Chair

How the day runs

The day opens with a state-of-the-project update from the core team on releases, growth, and roadmap. Next is an Ask the Devs panel, where attendees put questions directly to the maintainers. The rest of the program is practitioner talks on migrating from Terraform, performance and instrumentation at scale, and running OpenTofu inside platform engineering teams, including innersource adoption models in larger organizations. Breaks are built in for hallway conversations, which is where many of the day’s most useful exchanges happen.

Who should attend, and what they’ll take away

The day is built for DevOps engineers, platform engineers, and infrastructure leaders. That especially includes teams running Terraform in production that are evaluating or planning a migration. They will leave with a clear picture of what migration involves, including the trade-offs between keeping existing workflows and re-platforming, from teams that have already done it.

Existing OpenTofu users will learn how others use recent capabilities and operate at scale. Platform teams building internal developer platforms will find the sessions on provisioning and governance directly applicable. Contributors and prospective contributors get a full day with the core team and a clear sense of where the project is heading and how to help.

No preparation is required. The sessions assume familiarity with OpenTofu, Terraform, or a similar tool. Attendees who arrive with questions about their own infrastructure will get the most out of the day.

A community in one room

OpenTofu is built and governed in the open. Since its founding it has been backed by a community of individual contributors and companies including Scalr, Spacelift, env0, Gruntwork, and Harness. OpenTofu Day is the one time each cycle that its maintainers, contributors, and users from around the world are in the same place. Users can bring production problems straight to the people writing the code, maintainers hear what the community needs next, and newcomers find a way in.

Join us

OpenTofu Day takes place November 9, 2026, in Salt Lake City, Utah, as part of KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2026.

Register Now