HashiCorp announced it will sunset Terraform CDK, the TypeScript‑based front end to Terraform that let engineers author cloud resources with IDE support instead of HCL. The move leaves developers who liked CDK’s programming‑language approach looking for alternatives. Encore positions itself as that option, not by generating Terraform JSON but by treating infrastructure primitives as native parts of application code. When a developer writes `new SQLDatabase()` in an Encore service, the framework parses the code, spins up a local PostgreSQL instance for `encore run`, and on deployment creates an RDS instance in AWS or a Cloud SQL instance in GCP automatically.

No separate state files, no `cdktf synth` step, and type safety extends from resource definition to database queries and API handlers. The platform also bundles Pub/Sub, object storage and secret management behind simple TypeScript classes, provisioning SNS/SQS or S3 behind the scenes. Companies such as Groupon already run production workloads this way, and the same code can be self‑hosted via Docker or deployed through Encore Cloud.

Developers gain a single source of truth and a tighter local‑to‑cloud parity without juggling multiple configuration layers.