k8s-config-connector VS atlantis

If your company is k8s centric and the developers are most comfortable with k8s, you might want to focus more on something specific to k8s such as helm, or even if you don't get into helm you may want to use config connector in your yaml to manage GCP resources in an IaC compliant method. You can manage k8s resources with terraform, but if your developers are currently comfortable working directly with k8s you are going to see significant pushback getting them to add terraform as a middleware. You probably still want to manage your GKE clusters and VPCs with terraform since you can't really use config connector.

Config Connector [1] is also an option in this space for GCP, it supports many GCP resources and thus far our experience with it has been largely positive.

[1] https://cloud.google.com/config-connector/docs/overview

We use it heavily with GCP's Kubernetes Config Connector to provision architecture. It could similarly be used for Cloud Functions, etc. given a repo URL that GCP can access. GitOps + operator pattern is a pretty powerful mechanism to let k8s continuously seek state towards your ideal. https://cloud.google.com/config-connector/docs/overview

For K8s, we were using Cloud Composer to do it for us but wanted more fine control over CI/CD, so we decided to go with Airflow on K8s. That's all hosted in GKE now and deployed using ArgoCD with helm. This also led down the IaC rabbit hole which has been a ton of fun too. We use the GCP ConfigConnector resources for that which is a little challenging at first, but gets a lot easier as time goes on.

Terraform is 90% of cloud IaC. But there are newer Kubernetes Operators like Config Connector that can create cloud specific resources.

It works particularly well with Google Config Connector as then it's all just manifests.

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/