Kubernetes Infrastructure as Code (IaC) Tools

It makes clusters and surrounding cloud resources repeatable, reviewable and version-controlled, instead of built by hand.

Terraform and OpenTofu run as CLI-driven workflows with state files. Crossplane manages cloud resources as Kubernetes resources, so controllers keep them in the desired state.

A Kubernetes sub-project that uses Kubernetes-style APIs to create, upgrade and operate clusters themselves.

All 5 original tools are kept. OpenTofu, Cluster API and cdk8s were added.

Links were checked when this page was updated and all of them loaded.

CNCF announced Crossplane's graduation on 6 November 2025, reporting more than 3,000 contributors from over 450 organizations. OpenTofu, the Terraform fork, was accepted into the CNCF Sandbox on 23 April 2025.

Terraform 1.16.6 was the latest release on 14 October 2026, and Terraform 1.17.0 was in release-candidate stage (rc2 on 14 October 2026), adding support for variables and locals in provider requirements. OpenTofu 1.13.0 was released on 30 September 2026, with 1.13.1 following on 1 October and 1.12.8 on 14 October with a security fix; 1.13 adds Windows on ARM64 as an official platform and an experimental linter, and is the last series with official 32-bit builds.

Pulumi announced Neo on 16 September 2025 as a platform engineering AI agent built to manage infrastructure on any cloud. It appears as a teammate in Pulumi Cloud, works within your access controls, and its capabilities are also offered through Pulumi's MCP Server. Pulumi said Neo was free of charge while in preview and gave no pricing or general-availability date at that time. Pulumi's product page now says Neo is generally available to all Pulumi users, so check Pulumi's pricing page for current terms.

Pulumi's May 2026 release brought its Neo agent into the terminal with a new pulumi neo command, and let users mention Neo in GitHub issues and pull requests and in Slack. A pulumi do command performs direct create, read, update, delete and list operations across supported clouds. Pulumi also announced providers for CoreWeave, including CoreWeave Kubernetes Service, and for the NVIDIA AI Cluster Runtime. Co-founder and CEO Joe Duffy was quoted as saying LLMs now do over 20% of infrastructure deployments, up from virtually zero a year ago.

Crossplane 2.0, announced on 12 August 2025, made composite and managed resources namespaced, let compositions include any Kubernetes resource, and added an Operation type for one-off, scheduled and event-driven day-two tasks such as upgrades and backups. The project says it keeps backward compatibility with the vast majority of v1.x configurations. On its GitHub releases page in October 2026, v2.4.2 (22 September) was the newest stable release; v2.4, released on 20 August, now watches required resources, runs scale-to-zero providers, and ships the CLI only from cli.crossplane.io.

The section 'More IaC for Kubernetes' lists Crossplane, OpenTofu, Pulumi, Cluster API. Further tools.

The Software Tools Directory page links to curated directories across AI and ML, DevOps, observability, data, security and developer tooling.

Links were rechecked in October 2026 and all outbound links on this page returned 200 to automated checks. For related directories, see DevOps, CI/CD Tools, Platform Engineering and Developer Experience on this site.