atmos

Use Atmos to break your architecture into reusable Components that you implement using Terraform "root modules". Then tie everything together using Stack configurations defined in YAML.

Atmos can change how you think about the Terraform code you write to build your infrastructure. Atmos is a framework that simplifies complex cloud architectures and DevOps workflows into intuitive CLI commands. Its strength in managing DRY configurations at scale for Terraform and is supported by robust design patterns, comprehensive documentation, and a passionate community, making it a versatile tool for both startups and enterprises. Atmos is extensible to accommodate any tooling, including enterprise-scale Terraform, and includes custom policy controls, vendoring, and GitOps capabilities out of the box. Everything is open source and free.

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You can try out atmos directly in your browser using GitHub Codespaces

Already start one? Find it here.

Screenshots

Example of running atmos to describe infrastructure.

Introduction

Atmos centralizes the DevOps chain and cloud automation/orchestration into a robust command-line tool, streamlining environments and workflows into straightforward CLI commands. Leveraging advanced hierarchical configurations, it efficiently orchestrates both local and CI/CD pipeline tasks, optimizing infrastructure management for engineers and cloud architects alike. You can then run the CLI anywhere, such as locally or in CI/CD.

The Atmos project consists of a command-line tool, a Go library, and even a terraform provider. It provides numerous conventions to help you provision, manage, and orchestrate workflows across various toolchains. You can even access the configurations natively from within terraform using our terraform-provider-utils.

Cloud Posse uses this tool extensively for automating cloud infrastructure with Terraform and Kubernetes, but it can be used to automate any complex workflow.

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Did you know?

By leveraging Atmos in conjunction with Cloud Posse's expertise in AWS, terraform blueprints, and our knowledgeable community, teams can achieve operational mastery and innovation faster, transforming their infrastructure management practices into a competitive advantage.

Core Features

Atmos streamlines Terraform orchestration, environment, and configuration management, offering developers and DevOps a set of powerful tools to tackle deployment challenges. Designed to be cloud agnostic, it enables you to operate consistently across various cloud platforms. These features boost efficiency, clarity, and control across various environments, making it an indispensable asset for managing complex infrastructures with confidence.

• Terminal UI Polished interface for easier interaction with Terraform, workflows, and commands.
• Native Terraform Support: Orchestration, backend generation, varfile generation, ensuring compatibility with vanilla Terraform.
• Stacks: Powerful abstraction layer defined in YAML for orchestrating and deploying components.
• Components: A generic abstraction for deployable units, such as Terraform "root" modules.
• Vendoring: Pulls dependencies from remote sources, supporting immutable infrastructure practices.
• Custom Commands: Extends Atmos's functionality, allowing integration of any command with stack configurations.
• Workflow Orchestration: Comprehensive support for managing the lifecycle of cloud infrastructure from initiation to maintenance.

See all features of Atmos.

Use Cases

Atmos has consistently demonstrated its effectiveness in addressing these key use-cases, showcasing its adaptability and strength in the cloud infrastructure and DevOps domains:

• Managing Large Multi-Account Cloud Environments: Suitable for organizations using multiple cloud accounts to separate different projects or stages of development.
• Cross-Platform Cloud Architectures: Ideal for businesses that need to manage configuration of services across AWS, GCP, Azure, etc., to build a cohesive system.
• Multi-Tenant Systems for SaaS: Perfect for SaaS companies looking to host multiple customers within a unified infrastructure. Simply define a baseline tenant configuration once, and then seamlessly onboard new tenants by reusing this baseline through pure configuration, bypassing the need for further code development.
• Efficient Multi-Region Deployments: Atmos facilitates streamlined multi-region deployments by enabling businesses to define baseline configurations with stacks and extend them across regions with DRY principles through imports and inheritance.
• Compliant Infrastructure for Regulated Industries: Atmos empowers DevOps and SecOps teams to create vetted configurations that comply with SOC2, HIPAA, HITRUST, PCI, and other regulatory standards. These configurations can then be efficiently shared and reused across the organization via service catalogs, component libraries, vendoring, and OPA policies, simplifying the process of achieving and maintaining rigorous compliance.
• Empowering Teams with Self-Service Infrastructure: Allows teams to manage their infrastructure needs independently, using predefined templates and policies.
• Streamlining Deployment with Service Catalogs, Landing Zones, and Blueprints: Provides ready-to-use templates and guidelines for setting up cloud environments quickly and consistently.

[!TIP] Don't see your use-case listed? Ask us in the #atmos Slack channel, or join us for "Office Hours" every week.

Moreover, atmos is not only a command-line interface for managing clouds and clusters. It provides many useful patterns and best practices, such as:

• Enforces a project structure convention, so everybody knows where to find things.
• Provides clear separation of configuration from code, so the same code is easily deployed to different regions, environments and stages
• It can be extended to include new features, commands, and workflows
• The commands have a clean, consistent and easy to understand syntax
• The CLI code is modular and self-documenting

Telemetry

Atmos collects anonymous telemetry to help improve the product by understanding how it's used.

You can opt-out of telemetry collection in either of the following ways:

• Set settings.telemetry.enabled: false in your atmos.yaml
• Or set the environment variable: ATMOS_TELEMETRY_ENABLED=false

Note for Atmos Pro users: If you’re using Atmos Pro, your workspace ID will be included in telemetry events. This allows our team to provide more effective support and assist with troubleshooting as part of your subscription.

To learn more about what is collected and how it works, see the Telemetry Documentation.

Documentation

Find all documentation at: atmos.tools

Developer Tools

Testing Atmos in Geodesic

The scripts/test-geodesic-prebuilt.sh script allows you to quickly test Atmos changes inside a Geodesic container without rebuilding the entire Geodesic image.

Usage:

./scripts/test-geodesic-prebuilt.sh <path-to-infrastructure>

Example:

./scripts/test-geodesic-prebuilt.sh ~/Dev/cloudposse/infra/infra-live

What it does:

1. Builds Atmos for Linux (cross-compiles if needed for your architecture)
2. Launches a Geodesic container with:
   • The pre-built Atmos binary mounted to /usr/local/bin/atmos
   • Your infrastructure directory mounted to /workspace
   • Atmos-managed AWS credentials from ~/.config/atmos/ (following XDG conventions)
   • Standard XDG environment variables configured

This workflow is much faster than rebuilding Geodesic images during development and allows you to iterate quickly on Atmos changes while testing in a realistic containerized environment.

✨ Contributing

This project is under active development, and we encourage contributions from our community.

Many thanks to our outstanding contributors:

For 🐛 bug reports & feature requests, please use the issue tracker.

In general, PRs are welcome. We follow the typical "fork-and-pull" Git workflow.

1. Review our Code of Conduct and Contributor Guidelines.
2. Fork the repo on GitHub
3. Clone the project to your own machine
4. Commit changes to your own branch
5. Push your work back up to your fork
6. Submit a Pull Request so that we can review your changes

NOTE: Be sure to merge the latest changes from "upstream" before making a pull request!

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Join our Open Source Community on Slack. It's FREE for everyone! Our "SweetOps" community is where you get to talk with others who share a similar vision for how to rollout and manage infrastructure. This is the best place to talk shop, ask questions, solicit feedback, and work together as a community to build totally sweet infrastructure.

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License

Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one
or more contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file
distributed with this work for additional information
regarding copyright ownership.  The ASF licenses this file
to you under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (the
"License"); you may not use this file except in compliance
with the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at

  https://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0

Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing,
software distributed under the License is distributed on an
"AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY
KIND, either express or implied.  See the License for the
specific language governing permissions and limitations
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