Alternatives to Terraform Cloud

Emmanuel — Mon, 07 Nov 2022 02:00:44 +0000

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.

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

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.

DEV Community: Mechanicode

Alternatives to Terraform Cloud