Compare Atlantis vs. Terraform

Atlantis operates as a self-hosted solution, ensuring that your credentials remain within your own infrastructure. It functions as either a Golang binary or a Docker image and is compatible with deployment on various platforms such as VMs, Kubernetes, and Fargate. This tool listens for webhooks from popular version control systems including GitHub, GitLab, Bitbucket, and Azure DevOps. It executes Terraform commands remotely and provides feedback with their outputs. Employed by one of the leading companies globally, it effectively manages over 600 Terraform repositories and supports a team of 300 developers. Having been in production for more than two years, each pull request now features a comprehensive log detailing the infrastructure changes made, the contributors involved, and the approvals granted. Atlantis includes the option to mandate approvals for every production change, facilitating compliance with audits without disrupting your workflows. Developers can initiate Terraform pull requests without needing to expose their credentials, while operators can set requirements for approvals before permitting application changes. This ensures that all alterations are applied prior to merging into the master branch, enhancing both accountability and oversight in the development process. Additionally, the system's detailed change logs promote transparency and traceability, making it an invaluable tool for managing infrastructure as code.

Terraform is a powerful open-source tool for managing infrastructure as code, offering a consistent command-line interface to interact with numerous cloud services. By translating cloud APIs into declarative configuration files, Terraform enables users to define their infrastructure requirements clearly. Infrastructure can be written using these configuration files, leveraging the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), which provides a straightforward way to describe resources through blocks, arguments, and expressions. Before making any changes to your infrastructure, executing the command terraform plan allows you to verify that the proposed execution plan aligns with your expectations. To implement the desired configuration, you can use terraform apply, which facilitates the application of changes across a wide range of cloud providers. Furthermore, Terraform empowers users to manage the entire lifecycle of their infrastructure — from creating new resources to overseeing existing ones and eventually removing those that are no longer necessary, ensuring efficient management of cloud environments. This holistic approach to infrastructure management helps streamline operations and reduces the risk of errors during deployment.