Today HashiCorp, a leader in the DevOps marketplace, released Atlas to the general public after a successful beta program. Atlas unites HashiCorp’s popular open source tools for development and infrastructure management to create a version control system for infrastructure. Teams of operators use Atlas to responsibly deploy applications and make changes to infrastructure through a versioned, auditable, and collaborative process.
During the beta period, Atlas doubled nodes under management each month and attracted large enterprises such as Mozilla, Cisco, and Capgemini as well as growing startups. The success of the beta further solidifies HashiCorp’s position as a leader in the DevOps marketplace.
“The amount of progress Atlas has shown from both a product and business perspective over the past six months is awe-inspiring,” said Mitchell Hashimoto, Co-Founder and CEO of HashiCorp. “I’m incredibly proud of the team, and excited to share even more announcements in the coming months.”
The goal of operations and infrastructure management is to deploy and maintain applications with an automated, error-free, and auditable process. However, many organizations use manual processes that are time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to scale. As more technologies are added to the modern datacenter, from configuration management to containers and schedulers across multiple clouds, the management process becomes more complex and risky.
Atlas solves the datacenter complexity problem and achieves the goal of infrastructure management by automating operations processes to responsibly deploy applications and make changes to infrastructure. Just as version control for application code grants transparency, auditability, and collaboration to application development, version control for infrastructure accomplishes the same for infrastructure management on both public and private clouds. As a result, Atlas provides a common workflow to simplify deployments across one or many clouds.
Mozilla is using Atlas as the infrastructure management layer for its Socorro project, which recently migrated from a private datacenter to the cloud. Mozilla is a user of the open source projects Packer, Terraform, and Consul and is now tying them together through Atlas.
“We initially rolled our own solution for infrastructure CI and deployment. As the team grew, our homebrew solution struggled to centrally manage configuration, Terraform state, and access control,” said Chris Lonnen, Internal Tools and Systems Architect at Mozilla. “Atlas remedies all of these challenges for us and provides a beautiful interface for audit logs, infrastructure history, systemwide monitoring, and more. We’ve never lost 9s betting on a HashiCorp product.”
Cisco is using Atlas components to power Shipped, its new developer platform to bring applications from development to production in five minutes. Right now the project is in Alpha, but the platform is expanding to add integrations with on-premise and public cloud providers, monitoring and logging tools, and additional advanced features. Impressively, the developer experience will stay intuitive and direct as these new capabilities are added.
“Atlas enabled our determined development team to rapidly bring Shipped to market. We decided to use Atlas to simplify our platform, and because of its multi-cloud deployment abilities,” said Ken Owens, Chief Technical Officer at Cisco Cloud Services. “Atlas aligns well with Cisco’s greater Intercloud strategy.”
Capgemini built Apollo, its next generation application delivery platform on Atlas and Mesos. The previous platform relied on manual processes for server configuration and provisioning, which lead to a fragile, time-consuming deployment pipeline and information silos between teams. The new system is fully automated from development to production, which has saved employee resources previously spent on manual tasks, increased the number of deploys per day, and reduced downtime.
Atlas and HashiCorp’s Open Source Ecosystem
Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, Serf, Consul, and Vault are the open-source foundation for Atlas. All the components are hosted and run in Atlas, and can be used individually or all together:
- Vagrant is a tool for managing development environments.
- Packer automates building artifacts such as AMIs, Docker containers, OpenStack images, VMware images, and more. Packer-produced artifacts can be stored in Atlas.
- Terraform automates infrastructure provisioning on Amazon Web Services, Google Compute Engine, OpenStack, Azure, and more.
- Serf’s gossip protocol is used by Consul for failure detection and message propagation in a server cluster.
- Consul is a tool for runtime orchestration, complete with service discovery, a key/value store, and health checks.
- Finally, Vault is a tool for managing keys and secrets in distributed systems. Vault is used to store all credentials used by Atlas.
When all the components are used from development in Vagrant to production monitoring with Consul, Atlas is a fully versioned application delivery pipeline. Teams of operators can review and collaborate on Vagrant development environment versions, server configuration updates made by Packer, infrastructure updates made by Terraform, and alerts triggered by Consul. This simplifies rollbacks, makes infrastructure debugging feasible, and allows teams to easily share configurations.
