kubefirst VS atlantis

this isn't just any typical friday for us though, this is the day that we've been awaiting forever!!! we're excited to announce that not only did we release a new awesome UI for the kubefirst instant gitops platform, and not only is it all still free and installs gitops platforms in minutes, and not only is it an incredible new user experience, but we even let you play our new video game flappy-kray during the cluster provisioning operation. 😱🚀🎮

[cofounder alert] Would love for you to consider our kubefirst instant gitops FOSS platforms. Fully managed K8S: our platform provisions managed kubernetes clusters in our cloud versions of the platform - or k3d clusters when running the platform locally Support for cross cloud and bare metal: we support aws, civo, vultr*, digitalocean*, and apply our k3d platform to bare metal stories, but our homelabs community is going in some neat new directions for bare metal k8s as well. Installation on new machines should be fully automatic: 100% - single command Terraform: all infra (terraform) and app config (argocd) is powered by a gitops repository that we give you, the tf is wired up and automated with atlantis, and your changes to the platform are a pull request away. love most of our tools, but hate a couple and want a bunch more - no problem, start here. --- stuff you didn't ask for: - application delivery with argo workflows preintegrated with github or gitlab with self hosted runners - secrets management, user management, and an oidc provider with hasicorp vault that's automatically configured throughout the platform. vault is our single source of truth for every secret throughout the platform (apps, iac, ci, etc) - cluster management: management of workload clusters (rancher like) will be release in 2.2 in a few weeks. we have to release our new ui first in 2.1 and that's expected in the next week or two. --- it seems like with the immediate cross cloud / hybrid needs you have, you may need more out of cluster management than we can offer today, but it's the focus for the next 2 releases. we're an open source free solution that's trying to solve a lot of the problems that you're up against, we have an active community and would love to help support your use case.

nothing blew up accidentally this week, but our team at kubefirst is falling more and more in love with aws-nuke. it's an open source command line tool that lets you basically reset an aws account back to an empty state. if you have an environment where you regularly practice your platform provisioning, you probably know that failed destroys while iterating on orchestration can leave junk behind pretty easily. aws-nuke has been so nice to be able to blow away everything in an aws account - and then we just run terraform in the account to get all our core infra back afterward. nice allowlist filters and dryrun detail work too. check them out.

we'll be looking into leveraging this technique at kubefirst - wondering if anyone here has other thoughts on the tech used in this piece or any FOSS alternatives we should be considering for container sig validation? this seems just about as frictionless as the discipline can get - but don't know what other gems might be out there in this space that folks may be flipping over.

at kubefirst we internally love both helm and kustomize. to build our instant oss gitops platforms we use both.

at kubefirst we build containers a lot - gitops ci pipelines are part of our instant oss platforms. i ran into this issue a few years ago that blew my mind and i haven't been able to reproduce until yesterday.

check us out if it sounds neat ⭐ https://github.com/kubefirst/kubefirst

Kubernetes: launch a service of your choosing, like Pritunl VPN. Dockerize it, create some helm charts for it, set it up in a CICD pipeline of your choosing. There's also a project called nebulous you might want to check out that aims to demonstrate k8s capabilities with a live env but it's very early stages. If you can do the former task in, say, DigitalOcean, you'll have a good head start. I can send you some additional "homework" you can work on if you'd like as well and the solution to the first task I mentioned just DM me.

None of these are a replacement of Terraform Cloud (recently rebranded to HCP Terraform). For example, when you create a PR, it could affect multiple workspaces. The new experimental version of TFC/TFE (I refuse to call it HCP!) implements Stacks, which is something like a workflow, and links one workspace output to other workspace inputs. None of the open-source solutions, including the paid Digger [0], support this - only the paid one, such as Spacelift [1] (which is the closest to TFC if you ask me). Having a monorepo of Terraform is a common design pattern, so, if I change an embedded module, it could trigger changes it many workspaces. As far as I know, Atlantis [2] can't really help in this case.

By the way, the reason I singled-out Spacelift is due to its quality, and the great Terraform provider it has. Scalr [3], for example, has a really low-quality Terraform provider. I extensively use the hashicorp/tfe provider to manage TFC itself.

[0]: https://digger.dev/

[1]: https://spacelift.io/

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

[3]: https://www.scalr.com/

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/