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Emmanuel for Mechanicode

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Alternatives to Terraform Cloud

Like most folks who probably arrived at this blog, I attempted to introduce Terraform cloud to my organization but was ushered away due to cost.

I needed a better solution to managing our terraform state in a large team that did not require cumbersome locking processes.. cough cough DynamoDB

Atlantis turns out to the the tool i had been looking for.

It is a no-frills application that listens for Terraform pull request events via webhooks. In my case, I used GitHub webhooks to automate and enforce my organization's terraform workflows in an auditable manner.

Quick Rundown

It enables a CI/CD pipeline for infrastructure (GitOps), which causes the PR to become the system of record.

architecture

Benefits

  • Increased visibility and auditing of Infrastructure changes
  • Manages terraform state locking until the pull request is merged
  • Approval-based infrastructure builds
  • Centralizes permissions to service accounts vs. users
  • Enables collaboration with all engineering teams

Cons

  • webhook interactions happen one way via pushes. This requires a public endpoint to interface with Github (if your VCS is self-hosted, this may not be an issue)
  • Drift detection alerts for rarely used repositories need to be manually configured.

PR Workflow

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Conclusion
If you are on a budget and looking for remote state management, then this is the best OSS alternative to terraform cloud that I have found.

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