The most popular orchestration tools are AWS CloudFormation, Google Cloud Deployment Manager, HashiCorp Terraform, Microsoft Azure Resource Manager, and Pulumi, which all variously allow developers to automate the deployment of infrastructure. For many years, Terraform was one of the most important and widespread IaC tools, but its decision to shift away from the open source Mozilla public license led to the development of OpenTofu, an open source fork that is gaining in popularity.
On the configuration management side, third-party tools like Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and SaltStack remain popular ways of configuring, storing, and automating builds of virtual server environments, while many developers use Docker for their container images.
Many of these tools can be used in tandem, as the likes of Ansible, Chef, Puppet, and SaltStack focus on managing configurations on infrastructure that already exists, while the provisioning tools like Terraform abstract that infrastructure layer away.
