checkov VS atlantis

Checkov Owner/Maintainer: Prisma Cloud by Palo Alto Networks (acquired in 2021) Age: First released on GitHub on March 31st, 2021 License: Apache License 2.0

‍Checkov is another great tool that examines your Terraform files (.tf), parsing the configurations and evaluating them against a comprehensive set of predefined policies. It scans Terraform-managed infrastructure and detects misconfigurations that could lead to security issues or non-compliance with best practices and regulations.

Bridgecrew — Infrastructure as code (IaC) security powered by the open source tool - Checkov. The core Bridgecrew platform is free for up to 50 IaC resources.

Kustomize: It provides a solution to customize the Kubernetes resource base configuration and differential configuration without template and DSL. It does not solve the constraint problem itself, but needs to cooperate with a large number of additional tools to check constraints, such as Kube-linter, Checkov and kubescape.

Checkov is a versatile static code analysis tool designed for infrastructure as code (IaC) and software composition analysis (SCA). It supports a wide range of technologies, including Terraform, CloudFormation, Kubernetes, Docker, and others, to detect security and compliance issues through graph-based scanning. Checkov also performs SCA scans, identifying vulnerabilities in open source packages and images by checking for Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs). Additionally, it is integrated into Prisma Cloud Application Security, a platform that helps developers secure cloud resources and infrastructure-as-code files, enabling the identification, rectification, and prevention of misconfigurations throughout the development lifecycle.

For your Dockerfiles, you can also scan them. There are lots of tools that can check your Dockerfiles. They will validate if Dockerfile is compliant with Docker best practices such as not using root user, making sure a health check exists, and not exposing the SSH port. You can use Snyk and Checkov.

You could try https://www.checkov.io/

We use https://www.checkov.io/ for this, it's very simple to get started with and works really well as PR quality gate

Once there is a CI pipeline for delivering infra changes you can add static code analysis tools (checkov) and even start testing changes (terratest)

I just had a brief chat with one of the developers of Checkov and it sounds nice (and open source). I haven't had a chance to play with it, but if you want to it's at https://www.checkov.io/

Atlantis is a pull request automation tool that works well with plain Terraform right away. But what if we're already using Terramate to generate Terraform code?

Atlantis automates reviewing and deploying Terraform via pull requests, streamlining collaboration and ensuring consistency across Terraform deployments.

For example, Atlantisgo for Terraform, Zapier’s Kubechecks for Argo CD, Quizlet’s GitHub action all do something similar to this. But a generic, extensible tool for IaC providers doesn’t seem to exist. Additionally, many of them require exposing your Kubernetes cluster or other infrastructure to third-party access, webhooks, etc.

Our first attempt was to introduce other engineering teams to Terraform - the Platform team was already using it extensively with Terragrunt, and using Atlantis to automate plan and apply operations in a Git flow to ensure infrastructure was consistent. We'd written modules, with documentation, and an engineer would simply need to raise a PR to use the module and provide the right values, and Atlantis (once the PR was approved by Platform) would go ahead and set it up for them.

Alternatively, you can look at solutions like Atlantis or spacelift.

Atlantis: https://www.runatlantis.io/

Looking at the commits at https://github.com/runatlantis/atlantis, it looks like 1.6.5. Am I right?

We use Atlantis [0] for CI/CD automation of Terraform pull requests to a centralized repository. It's pretty good too, especially for a self-hosted solution. I can't see how Terraform Cloud's costs would be justifiable for us without a custom contract.

[0] https://www.runatlantis.io/