digger VS terrateam

Currently, Github Actions is de-facto the only fully supported CI platform in Digger, we’ve been building it as a CI-agnostic tool (https://github.com/diggerhq/digger) from get go. We keep getting requests to support more CI systems on our community slack and over Github issues (https://github.com/diggerhq/digger/issues/81).

Unlike other automation tools for Terraform, Digger doesn’t run jobs on the server; instead it uses your CI (like Actions) as a compute backend. This is more secure and also much cheaper if you use your own runners in your CI.

But each CI and each VCS is ever so slightly different; and we are now at a crossroads - Should we build support for more CI platforms, or more features for GitHub Actions? We’d love any thoughts/inputs!

We just had a user submit an issue and a PR to revert the changes we made earlier that remove the option to disable telemetry. We feel like it’s a fair ask to share usage data with authors of an open-source tool that’s early in the making; but the user’s viewpoint is also perfectly understandable. Are we in the wrong here?

https://github.com/diggerhq/digger/issues/1179

Surely we aren’t the first open-source company to face this dilemma. We don’t want to alienate the community; but losing visibility of usage doesn’t sound great either. Give people the “more privacy” button and most are going to press it. Is there a happy medium?

Detecting and managing drift in Terraform is a multifaceted process. The use of Terraform commands such as terraform refresh and terraform plan plays a critical role in identifying drifts. Additionally, periodic monitoring of the infrastructure using these commands can aid in early detection and prevention of larger issues. Tools like Digger and Terraform Cloud offer dedicated drift detection and remediation mechanisms. These tools provide continuous monitoring and notifications, enabling teams to stay informed about the state of their infrastructure.

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Digger is an Open Source Infrastructure as Code management tool that helps orchestrate IaC such as Terraform & OpenTofu within GitHub Actions. Digger reuses compute used for application code so that you don't overpay for 3rd party managed compute for IaC. This approach eliminates the duplication of CI/CD infrastructure such as compute, jobs, and logs, and reduces security concerns by keeping sensitive data within the CI job. Digger's integration with existing CI systems offers scalability by leveraging on-demand compute resources and enhances security by confining data within the existing CI environment.

Digger is an Open Source IaC management platform that allows you to orchestrate terraform/OpenTofu in your CI/CD system. It helps you resue async jobs infrastructure with compute, orchestration, logs, etc of your existing CI. Digger also has a pro version built on top of Digger’s community edition. Digger’s “bring your own compute” ensures that users have private runners by defualt and don’t have to pay for it additionally. Digger pro gives team leads, managers and IaC practitioners dashboards, Drift Detection, RBAC via OPA policies and concurrency so they can help guide the team.

We have this issue filed by a user and cannot quite decide internally what to do about it. It is clear that allowing everyone who comments to trigger apply is problematic. And we have this covered by the RBAC via OPA feature that allows users to set granular rego policies for who can do what. But it can also be viewed as an overkill to introduce the whole policy-as-code setup for a basic restriction like this.

Terrateam: After getting into some really big issues when running Terragrunt with Github Actions, I decided to look for a better CI solution. Terrateam is my CI/CD tool of choice here. Unfortunately as of December 2023, they increased their price from USD $175 to USD $496 monthly. Me being an existing customer I still pay the old amount (thank God!) Alternatively, you can look at solutions like Atlantis or spacelift.

Disclaimer: I am a co-founder of Terrateam (https://terrateam.io/) a competitor to Digger.

For anyone using Digger, are all of the enterprise features in the open source codebase? If you pay for digger, or you just paying for support and hosting? Or do they separate OSS from Community, Pro, and Enterprise plans?

Disclaimer: Co-founder of Terrateam.

For Terrateam[0], we have probably 70% of the enterprise offering but at around 1/10th the price. If there are any features that are deal breaker, feel free to reach out to me and we'll see what we can do. That being said, Spacelift is a much more luxurious piece of software than us. We are very utilitarian, but we have to rationalize that low price-point somehow.

[0] https://terrateam.io

Terrateam is an enterprise Atlantis alternative that lets you plan and apply all within pull requests and very minimal setup. We have a pretty active slack if you have any questions.

> It sure looks like AWS admin credentials are shared with Github, and also available to anything else in the diggerhq/digger action

I am a co-founder of Terrateam[0] which is a Terraform CI/CD as well. At the end of the day, you need to execute something to do these operations and having this component open source is important for auditing purposes. For Terrateam, we lean heavily into GitHub Actions so GitHub is at least managing any secrets and runs. One challenge is users could pin the Action that we publish to a specific version, but we also update it regularly and communicating to customers to update it is a challenge.

[0] https://terrateam.io

There are lots of options for this. I am co-founder of a product called Terrateam which makes it easy to slice up a mono repo for these usecases. We specialize in GitHub installations. But Spacelift, env0, and Scalr exist as options as well.

Many of the CI/CD tools take care of this. Terrateam tracks which plans are still valid after an apply and will force a re-plan. It also ensures that only one apply happens at a time.

We just released our self-hosted version available here: https://github.com/terrateamio/terrateam

I use Terrateam (disclaimer, I'm also a co-founder of it) does PR-level locks (but only on apply, or merge), and does apply serialization, and invalidates outdated plans on apply. You can plan as much as you want in parallel, though, because that does not impact the output. I don't think there are many other options for how to handle this.