Contact Us
Contact Us

Explore 19 Best Terraform Experts for Cloud Success

terraform experts - Explore 19 Best Terraform Experts for Cloud Success

The following ranked list highlights the world’s most prominent Terraform experts, selected for their deep contributions to Terraform’s open-source code, innovative tools and modules, thought leadership in infrastructure-as-code, and community influence.

These individuals include HashiCorp’s visionary founders and engineers, prolific open-source contributors, educators and authors of Terraform books, as well as startup leaders who built tooling around Terraform. Each has a proven track record of advancing Terraform usage globally – whether by writing core code or providers, creating widely used Terraform modules and frameworks, educating thousands of practitioners, or steering the direction of Terraform in the industry. Below is the updated list of top Terraform experts (ranked), followed by detailed profiles of each:

  1. Anton Babenko
  2. Owen Rumney
  3. Mikael Krief
  4. Yevgeniy Brikman
  5. Sebastian Stadil
  6. Ned Bellavance
  7. Erik Osterman
  8. Rosemary Wang
  9. Martin Atkins
  10. James Nugent
  11. Paul Hinze
  12. Barak Schoster
  13. Luke Kysow
  14. Anubhav Mishra
  15. Scott Winkler
  16. Brian Flad
  17. Paddy Carver
  18. Marcin Wyszynski
  19. Rob Barnes

Now, let’s delve deeper into their remarkable achievements and why each is considered a top Terraform expert:

Anton Babenko

YouTube Video

Nationality: Norwegian

Anton Babenko is an AWS Hero and a superstar in the Terraform community, best known for creating and maintaining the terraform-aws-modules project, which provides over 40 production-grade Terraform modules for AWS services.

As an independent consultant, Anton has authored open-source modules downloaded millions of times, standardizing Terraform best practices on AWS. He also founded and hosts Weekly.tf, a newsletter and live stream series delivering “Your Weekly Dose of Terraform”, where he live-codes modules and reviews Terraform tools for the community. Anton’s contributions earned him recognition as a HashiCorp Ambassador and one of the first Terraform influencers. Based in Norway, he frequently speaks at HashiCorp and AWS events, sharing his expertise in DevOps and IaC. Through tireless open-source work and community mentorship, Anton Babenko has become one of the most influential Terraform experts worldwide.

Owen Rumney

Nationality: British

Owen Rumney is the co-creator of tfsec, the popular static analysis security scanner for Terraform code. An open-source enthusiast from the UK, Owen built tfsec in 2019 to help Terraform users catch misconfigurations and security issues before deployment – a crucial capability as IaC adoption grew.

The tool quickly gained traction on GitHub with its simple rule checks for AWS, Azure, and Google Terraform configs. Owen and his co-founder brought tfsec into Aqua Security via acquisition, where he now works as a Senior Cloud Engineer focusing on IaC security. He continues to develop tfsec and engages with the community through talks and blogs on securing Terraform. Owen’s work has made it significantly easier for Terraform practitioners to adopt “shift-left” security, and his expertise in both Terraform and security puts him among the top Terraform experts. He proves that infrastructure as code can be made safer and more reliable through open-source innovation.

Mikael Krief

Nationality: French

Mikael Krief is a France-based DevOps consultant and Microsoft MVP who has become a Terraform authority through writing, speaking, and community work. He is the author of the “Terraform Cookbook”, now in its Second Edition (Packt, 2023), which provides dozens of practical recipes for using Terraform across AWS, Azure, Google Cloud and more.

Mikael has also co-authored guides on Azure DevOps integration with Terraform and often blogs about IaC best practices. In the HashiCorp community, Mikael was selected as a Terraform Ambassador for sharing knowledge – for example, he’s known to answer questions on forums and was an early tester of Terraform 0.12+ features. He often presents at user groups and conferences. Additionally, Mikael Krief contributes to Azure Terraform provider modules and plugins, bridging Microsoft’s cloud with Terraform’s automation. Through his detailed writing and active engagement, Mikael has earned a reputation as a go-to Terraform expert, especially for those looking to implement Terraform in a multi-cloud, DevOps-driven environment.

Yevgeniy Brikman

Yevgeniy Brikman - Explore 19 Best Terraform Experts for Cloud Success

Nationality: American

Yevgeniy Brikman is co-founder of Gruntwork and author of the hugely popular book “Terraform: Up & Running.” A software engineer turned entrepreneur, Jim has been one of Terraform’s most vocal advocates since its early days.

His book (first published in 2017) became the handbook for Terraform practitioners, showcasing real-world patterns and best practices. At Gruntwork, he has built reusable Terraform module libraries and the Terragrunt tool to help startups and enterprises adopt Terraform easily and securely. Jim frequently speaks at conferences and writes about infrastructure as code, influencing thousands of DevOps engineers. His combination of hands-on coding (open-sourcing Terraform AWS modules and examples) and educational content has cemented Yevgeniy’s status as a top Terraform expert globally.

Sebastian Stadil

Nationality: American

Sebastian Stadil is the founder and CEO of Scalr, one of the earliest Terraform enterprise platforms, and a leading advocate for the OpenTF/OpenTofu movement. Sebastian has been building cloud automation solutions for over a decade – Scalr started as a general cloud management tool and pivoted to focus on Terraform automation, aiming to be for Terraform what GitHub is for Git.

He has consistently championed IaC best practices like reusability, policy guardrails, and multi-cloud support, which Scalr provides on top of Terraform. In 2023, Sebastian became a key voice opposing HashiCorp’s license change, helping organize the OpenTF Foundation to fork Terraform and donate it to the Linux Foundation. He frequently speaks at industry events and writes about the business impact of Terraform and infrastructure automation. With his long track record and recent OpenTofu leadership, Sebastian Stadil is recognized globally as a Terraform expert who combines technical insight with open-source advocacy for the IaC community.

Ned Bellavance

Ned Bellavance - Explore 19 Best Terraform Experts for Cloud Success

Nationality: American

Ned Bellavance is a prominent Terraform educator, content creator, and HashiCorp Ambassador who has helped countless engineers learn infrastructure as code. Founder of “Ned in the Cloud LLC”, he produces training courses, blogs, and the Day Two Cloud podcast, breaking down complex Terraform concepts into accessible lessons.

Ned has 20+ years of IT experience and is also a Microsoft MVP, but in the DevOps realm he’s best known for his Terraform expertise. He has taught official HashiCorp webinars and created a Terraform certification guide, always emphasizing real-world usage and best practices. As a frequent conference speaker and author, Ned focuses on the human side of infrastructure automation – guiding teams on how to adopt Terraform collaboratively and effectively. His clear teaching style and community contributions have made Ned Bellavance one of the go-to voices on Terraform.

Erik Osterman

Nationality: American

Erik Osterman is the CEO of Cloud Posse and a well-known Terraform expert who has contributed extensively to the Terraform open-source landscape. Based in the U.S., Erik founded Cloud Posse as a DevOps engineering firm that also maintains dozens of open-source Terraform modules, AWS reference architectures, and tools that make Terraform easier for companies to adopt.

Erik also curates the “SweetOps” community where Terraform best practices are shared, and hosts the “Office Hours” podcast talking about Terraform and Kubernetes trends. A strong proponent of reusable infrastructure as code, Erik coined the idea that Terraform modules should be treated like products – versioned and documented – and he’s backed that by creating Atmos, a tool to manage complex Terraform and Helm configurations at scale. Erik’s hands-on contributions and his role as a community organizer/teacher have made him a respected authority in Terraform. If you’re using an open Terraform module or reading a Terraform tip online, there’s a good chance Erik Osterman had a hand in it.

Rosemary Wang

Rosemary Wang - Explore 19 Best Terraform Experts for Cloud Success

Nationality: American

Rosemary Wang is a Developer Advocate at HashiCorp and author of “Infrastructure as Code, Patterns and Practices.” She is globally respected for her deep knowledge of Terraform and how it integrates with modern cloud architectures. Rosemary has worked on countless infrastructure-as-code projects and contributed to Terraform and other HashiCorp tools.

As a speaker and blogger, she excels at bridging development and operations – demonstrating Terraform in tandem with security (Vault, Sentinel) and networking (Consul) to build end-to-end solutions. She frequently appears in HashiCorp live streams and webinars (often pair-programming on Terraform providers or modules) and has a talent for tackling tough IaC challenges (like disaster recovery, policy as code, etc.). With her book and ongoing advocacy, Rosemary emphasizes repeatable patterns for Terraform at enterprise scale. Her community outreach and technical insights firmly establish Rosemary Wang as a top Terraform expert and mentor in the IaC community.

Martin Atkins

Nationality: British

Martin Atkins is a principal software engineer who was for many years one of Terraform’s core maintainers at HashiCorp. Often known by his handle “apparentlymart”, Martin contributed extensively to Terraform’s codebase and design – from the configuration language (HCL) to features like state workspaces and dependency lock files.

His Terraform RFCs and forum explanations are legendary for their clarity. In 2023, Martin made headlines by leaving HashiCorp to join the open-source OpenTofu (OpenTF) project, reflecting his commitment to keeping Terraform’s ecosystem truly open. Martin also writes a technical blog where he explores advanced Terraform topics. Highly respected for his technical depth and thoughtful approach, Martin Atkins has influenced Terraform’s direction more than almost anyone outside the founders. He remains a guiding voice in the community, now helping lead the next chapter of Terraform’s open-source journey (OpenTofu).

James Nugent

Nationality: British

James Nugent is an early Terraform pioneer who served as a core maintainer of Terraform at HashiCorp. A Brit with a background in cloud engineering, James was instrumental in Terraform’s development and adoption during its early years.

He co-developed Terraform Enterprise features and taught both introductory and advanced Terraform classes to customers. James has also contributed to the AWS Terraform Provider and wrote one of the first guides on using Terraform with private cloud infrastructure. After HashiCorp, he continued to apply Terraform practices at Apple and elsewhere, all while staying active in open source. James frequently speaks at infrastructure conferences – known for a witty, no-nonsense style – on topics like “Terraform Without the Mess” (ConfigMgmtCamp 2020). With his blend of hands-on coding and training experience, James Nugent is widely recognized as a Terraform expert who helped shape the tool’s community and best practices from the ground up.

Paul Hinze

Paul Hinze - Explore 19 Best Terraform Experts for Cloud Success

Nationality: American

Paul Hinze is the Engineering Director for Terraform at HashiCorp and one of the key figures driving Terraform’s roadmap and architecture in recent years. Rising through the ranks at HashiCorp, Paul has overseen major enhancements to Terraform’s core – including the 0.12 language revamp and the introduction of the Terraform Cloud & Enterprise features.

He is known for his deep understanding of Terraform’s graph-based planning engine, giving talks like “Terraform is Changing the World” (HashiConf keynote) where he breaks down how Terraform works under the hood. Paul also spearheaded initiatives to improve the developer experience for writing Terraform providers and modules. With a background at companies like Braintree, he brings a focus on reliability and scale. Paul Hinze’s strategic leadership and technical contributions have been pivotal to Terraform’s success, making him one of the most prominent Terraform experts in the industry.

Barak Schoster

Security should be built into Terraform from the first line of code — not added later as a patch.

Nationality: Israeli

Barak Schoster (Goihman) is the co-founder and former CTO of Bridgecrew, and the original creator of Checkov, another leading open-source tool for Terraform and IaC security scanning. Barak’s background is in software architecture and cybersecurity; he built Checkov in 2019 to automatically detect cloud misconfiguration in Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, and more.

Under his technical leadership, Bridgecrew’s platform gained a huge following among DevSecOps teams and was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2021. Barak has since become an Investor and Advisor in the cloud tooling space, but he remains closely tied to Terraform’s ecosystem – for instance, he often writes about Terraform security best practices and co-developed “Yor”. He has spoken at conferences like RSA and blogs on Medium about embedding security in Terraform pipelines. With Checkov downloaded millions of times, Barak Schoster’s impact on Terraform is far-reaching: he helped make security auditing a standard part of the Terraform workflow. His blend of entrepreneurial and technical skills solidifies his spot among the Terraform elite.

Luke Kysow

Nationality: Canadian

Luke Kysow is a principal engineer at HashiCorp and the co-creator of Atlantis, the popular open-source Terraform pull-request automation tool. Before joining HashiCorp, Luke developed Atlantis to help teams collaborate on Terraform changes via GitHub – an innovation that was quickly adopted by many companies to automate terraform plan/apply in CI.

At HashiCorp, he has worked on Consul’s ecosystem, but he remains a Terraform advocate, often discussing GitOps workflows for Terraform. Luke is also the author of “Consul: Up & Running,” showing his breadth in HashiCorp’s IaC suite. By creating one of the most widely used Terraform tooling extensions (Atlantis) and continuing to share his expertise on infrastructure tooling, Luke Kysow has earned recognition as a Terraform expert who improves how organizations use Terraform at scale.

Anubhav Mishra

Anubhav Mishra - Explore 19 Best Terraform Experts for Cloud Success

Nationality: Canadian

Anubhav Mishra is a technologist at HashiCorp (most recently in product management and R&D) who co-created Atlantis alongside Luke Kysow. With a passion for improving developer workflows, Anubhav helped build Atlantis in 2017 to make Terraform more team-friendly.

At HashiCorp, he served as Technical Advisor to the CTO and Head of HashiCorp Labs, working on cutting-edge projects like Waypoint and Boundary – and experimenting with Terraform integrations for newer use cases. He remains an active open-source contributor and a frequent speaker on infrastructure as code. Anubhav’s community engagement and his creation of tools that extend Terraform’s capabilities have made him a respected expert. Whether it’s enabling GitOps with Terraform or pushing IaC into new domains, Anubhav Mishra’s contributions continue to shape Terraform’s ecosystem and ease-of-use.

Scott Winkler

Nationality: American

Scott Winkler is a distinguished Terraform expert and DevOps engineer, best known as the author of “Terraform in Action” (Manning, 2021). With his extensive real-world experience, Scott wrote this comprehensive book to guide engineers through Terraform concepts, multi-cloud usage, and even extending Terraform for custom use cases.

He has spoken multiple times at HashiCorp’s HashiConf and community events (HashiTalks), sharing practical insights and war stories from using Terraform in production. Scott was recognized as a HashiCorp Ambassador for his contributions to the community, which include open-sourcing example projects and helping others on forums. He currently works as a senior engineer at Snowflake, where he helps implement infrastructure-as-code at scale. Whether he’s Terraforming cloud resources or even fun projects, Scott approaches IaC with creativity and rigor. His dedication to teaching and community engagement makes Scott Winkler one of the top names associated with Terraform excellence.

Brian Flad

Nationality: American

Brian Flad is the lead maintainer of the Terraform AWS Provider, Terraform’s most widely used provider that integrates with hundreds of AWS resources. As an engineer at HashiCorp (and previously at Amazon), Brian has authored thousands of commits to the AWS provider, reviewing community contributions and ensuring Terraform always supports the latest AWS features.

He also co-developed the Terraform Plugin Framework (released in 2022) to modernize how providers are built. Brian is a regular host of HashiCorp community office hours for AWS Terraform users and has spoken at AWS re:Invent deep dives. In addition, he contributes to many Terraform ecosystem tools and often helps other provider developers in the community. Brian Flad’s dedication to Terraform’s provider ecosystem – especially making AWS + Terraform a seamless experience – makes him one of the foremost Terraform experts. Every AWS Terraform user today benefits from Brian’s work.

Paddy Carver

Paddy Carver - Explore 19 Best Terraform Experts for Cloud Success

Nationality: American

Paddy Carver is a senior software engineer who was a core part of HashiCorp’s Terraform team, known for making Terraform provider development more accessible. He led the creation of the Terraform Plugin SDK (v2) and later the Terraform Plugin Framework, which significantly improved the experience of writing custom providers.

Paddy has a knack for explaining complex internals – he authored blog posts and recorded videos about Terraform’s provider architecture, type system, and upgrade processes. During his HashiCorp tenure, he also contributed to Terraform core and Nomad integration. Now at LaunchDarkly, Paddy continues to champion good developer experience, and he remains active in open source. Within the Terraform community, Paddy Carver is highly regarded for his behind-the-scenes contributions that empower countless others to extend Terraform. His work ensures Terraform’s ecosystem stays robust and growing.

Marcin Wyszynski

Nationality: Polish

Marcin Wyszynski is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Spacelift, a Terraform automation platform, and a leading voice in the Terraform community’s push for truly open source IaC. With SRE experience at Google and Facebook, Marcin has long been an expert in running Terraform at scale and in CI/CD pipelines.

He co-created Spacelift in 2020 to address enterprise needs in Terraform collaboration, and in 2023 he co-founded the OpenTF (OpenTofu) initiative to fork Terraform after HashiCorp’s licensing change. Marcin is an active maintainer of OpenTofu now, working to keep Terraform’s core open-source and community-driven. He frequently shares insights on scalability, policy enforcement, and GitOps for Terraform via blog posts and interviews. Marcin Wyszynski’s blend of hands-on engineering and leadership in the Terraform startup space makes him one of the most prominent Terraform experts today – especially as the ecosystem navigates its open-source future.

Rob Barnes

Nationality: British

Rob Barnes, aka “DevOps Rob”, is a Senior Developer Advocate at HashiCorp who specializes in Terraform and Vault. With a background as a platform engineer, Rob brings a security-focused perspective to infrastructure as code. He creates a ton of educational content: from HashiCorp’s official learn guides and webinars to his personal blog and the “Keepin’ It Secure” podcast.

Rob often appears in HashiCorp live streams demonstrating Terraform integrations – for example, provisioning Azure resources with Terraform and then securing them with Vault. He also has shown how to use new Terraform Cloud features and wrote modules to encourage adoption of HashiCorp’s newer products. As a charismatic speaker, Rob has emceed HashiConf events and regularly presents at user groups, promoting DevOps culture along with technical skills. Through his consistent advocacy and knowledge-sharing, Rob Barnes has become one of the faces of the Terraform community. He helps thousands of practitioners level up in Terraform, making him widely recognized as an expert in this space.

Wrap Up

These legends represent exceptional talent, making them extremely challenging to headhunt. However, there are thousands of other highly skilled IT professionals available to hire with our help. Contact us, and we will be happy to discuss your hiring needs.

Note: We’ve dedicated significant time and effort to creating and verifying this curated list of top talent. However, if you believe a correction or addition is needed, feel free to reach out. We’ll gladly review and update the page.

Ready to get started?