Terraform has become the de facto standard for Infrastructure as Code (IaC) in many organizations, enabling teams to define, provision, and manage their cloud infrastructure efficiently. However, as teams grow and infrastructure complexity increases, managing Terraform workflows collaboratively can become challenging. This is where Atlantis comes in.

What is Atlantis?

Atlantis is an open-source tool designed to automate Terraform workflows for teams, enabling a streamlined and collaborative approach to managing infrastructure. It integrates with version control systems like GitHub, GitLab, and Bitbucket to automate Terraform plan and apply commands, triggered directly from pull requests. This GitOps approach ensures that infrastructure changes are tracked, reviewed, and deployed in a controlled and transparent manner.

Advantages of Using Atlantis

1. Automated Workflows:
   Atlantis automatically runs terraform plan when a pull request is created and terraform apply when it is approved and merged. This automation reduces manual intervention, minimizing human errors and ensuring consistency in infrastructure changes.
2. Enhanced Collaboration:
   By integrating directly with version control systems, Atlantis enables seamless collaboration among team members. Engineers can review, discuss, and approve infrastructure changes directly in pull requests, maintaining a clear history and audit trail of changes.
3. Security and Compliance:
   Atlantis restricts who can run terraform apply commands, ensuring that only authorized users can make changes to production environments. This control helps maintain compliance with security policies and reduces the risk of unauthorized or unintended changes.
4. Scalability and Flexibility:
   Atlantis supports complex, multi-environment deployments. It can be configured to handle different Terraform workspaces, modules, and state backends, making it suitable for organizations of all sizes and varying infrastructure needs.
5. Cost Efficiency:
   Since Atlantis is open-source, it provides a cost-effective solution to managing Terraform workflows. Organizations can deploy Atlantis on their own infrastructure without incurring additional licensing costs, offering flexibility and control over their deployment.

Conclusion

Atlantis is a powerful tool that can help streamline your Terraform workflows, improve collaboration, and maintain control over your infrastructure changes. By automating Terraform plans and applies, providing a centralized place for change reviews, and supporting scalability, Atlantis enables teams to manage their cloud infrastructure more efficiently and securely.

Ready to enhance your Terraform workflows with Atlantis? Get in touch with our team at NimbusStack today to explore how we can help you deploy and optimize Atlantis for your organization.