Open source and DevOps go together like chocolate and peanut butter, or like milk and cookies (these metaphors are making me hungry). Basically, they’re inseparable and—while each is good in and of itself—they’re better when united. HashiCorp announced today that Atlas, a platform for a variety of leading open source tools, is now available to the general public to help organizations make DevOps even better.
HashiCorp has a number of popular, industry-leading open source tools at its disposal. Vagrant manages development environments. Packer automates building artifacts like Docker containers, OpenStack images, and VMware images. Consul is a tool for runtime orchestration. Serf is a protocol used by Consul for failure detection and message distribution in a server cluster. Terraform automates infrastructure provisioning on cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. They’re all great tools in and of themselves, but Atlas ties them all together into a powerful, cohesive whole.
Atlas has been available in beta for a while with tremendous success. Nodes under management consistently doubled month-to-month during the beta, and heavy hitters like Mozilla and Cisco jumped on board to test it out.
DevOps seeks to accelerate development and deployment. One of the primary attributes of DevOps is automation to facilitate automatic, error-free, auditable implementation of routine, repeatable functions. Many organizations strive to embrace DevOps tools and principles and leverage open source tools like Consul or Vagrant but use manual, time-consuming, error-prone processes that are difficult to scale and challenging to manage effectively.
HashiCorp believes that Atlas is the solution—a platform that brings it all together and enables organizations to manage end-to-end from configuration management to container deployments across multiple cloud environments. Each of the open source tools is fine alone, but the ability to manage and orchestrate them as a whole is very powerful.
“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, system-wide monitoring, and more. We’ve never lost 9s betting on a HashiCorp product.”
According to the HashiCorp press release, you can start using the hosted version of Atlas as of today, but on-premise deployments of Atlas won’t happen until late 2015. If you want more information about on-premise Atlas you can sign up at this link: https://atlas.hashicorp.com. The development features like Vagrant box builds and hosting and Packer builds and artifact storage are free, and the first 10 nodes are free as well. Pricing is $40 per node per month beyond the first 10 nodes.