
Atlas General Availability - ipedrazas
https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/atlas-general-availability.html
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tptacek
We use Vagrant for dev and Consul in our deployment and I still have no real
idea of what Atlas is.

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mitchellh
Great feedback. We've heard this and we've been making strides to improve it.
For the most part, this is largely our own doing: we didn't do a good job at
all of marketing Atlas to the open source community. There are various reasons
for this, including not wanting the community to feel we were pushing
commercializing onto them. Another reason is that as Atlas was in tech
preview, we wanted to build more features and stabilize on the features we
had. But we're carefully learning what the boundaries are and are spreading
them a bit more.

If you're an open source user, the first thing that you can do is just go to
atlas.hashicorp.com and see the features we add on top of the project you're
already using. We now break down features by project being augmented.

Example: Vagrant augmentation:
[https://atlas.hashicorp.com/learn/vagrant](https://atlas.hashicorp.com/learn/vagrant)

We have pages like that for all our tools.

We'll continue to improve this! Thanks for the feedback.

EDIT: Sorry, I was answering "why don't I know what Atlas is" versus the
answer that was expected for "what is Atlas". The best answer for that is to
use the homepage and click on the product (Vagrant, Packer, etc.) you use the
most! [http://atlas.hashicorp.com](http://atlas.hashicorp.com)

~~~
tptacek
I'm interested but still not clear on what this is. And: I'm one of those
people that periodically makes a point of reloading your website to see if
you're doing something else interesting. I've seen "Atlas" for awhile. Still
no idea what it is.

So is Atlas the "Pro" versions of your core offerings?

Or is it something else, a single coherent product that changes the way I'd
interact with Vagrant, &c? Is it like Packer As A Service? Does it _host_
images I make with Packer? Is it a centralized Consul repository?

I think it's the "managed nodes" pricing model (which is fine, don't get me
wrong) that makes me confused about what the offering is.

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mitchellh
Sorry, let me answer that.

Atlas is two things: enhancements to individual open source projects ("pro"
version if that helps), and a unification between our projects to give a full
dev to prod pipeline.

Per open source project we have, it adds features on top of it we felt didn't
fit within the scope of the open source project itself. Example: Vagrant box
hosting, Vagrant share (requires a server), Packer builds, Packer artifact
hosting, Consul UI, Consul alerts, Consul alert history, Terraform
collaboration, Terraform state storage, Terraform run locks, GitHub triggering
Terraform, etc. These are all features that enhance an individual HashiCorp
project. I'm not going to explain each here, since they're explained in the
blog post and of course expect an understanding of that individual project.

Then, Atlas unifies them: code push (Git, CI, etc.) triggers an automatic
Packer build which triggers a Terraform plan which triggers a Slack message
asking for approval to deploy which can then be deployed with a single button
which then causes the Consul UI to update with the latest info.

You can do this with our open source, purely, and many do. This was the
inspiration behind Atlas: the companies adopting our open source projects want
a complete story, and they're building it on their own, but they'd rather buy
it from us. Atlas is us delivering that full dev to prod story.

If you're a HashiCorp user, Atlas is valuable if you're using an indivual
project OR if you're looking for a complete deployment solution.

I hope this helps a lot more.

~~~
tptacek
Yup. Neato!

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mmcclellan
For any of us who have watched this team's output and quality and wondered
_Why isn't this team being acquired?_, here is Hashicorp's play. Congrats to
team on shipping. It will be interesting to see how all this plays out.

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jalfresi
I've never used any of Hashicorps stuff (thought consul did arrive on my radar
theother day..). Any recommendations? We use the Atlassian stack here (stash,
bamboo, etc) and deploy to AWS (regular AMIs rather than any of that fancy
docker stuff). Anything here we should look into?

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jtreminio
Vagrant has completely changed my development workflow.

So much so that I created a FOSS that uses it and Puppet:
[https://puphpet.com](https://puphpet.com)

~~~
dkordik
That's an awesome project you've got there. Thanks for sharing!

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devhead
Kudos to the team though, love the projects and will continue to support it as
it continues to mature.

There's still some pretty significant pain points, bit surprised they released
already. Hope they get piles of cash to roll in for all their hard work.

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geerlingguy
One question I have; with general availability, it seems they indicate packer
builds inside of Atlas are free now? It was my understanding that this would
be a paid product, so I have my workflow for the OSS vagrant boxes I build all
local.

If I can switch my workflow to build and store all the box versions inside of
Atlas, that would save some time and effort...

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sethvargo
The Packer builds, Vagrant boxes, and Vagrant share are free

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mrdrozdov
$40 per node!

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ipedrazas
thought the same!

Pricing seems a bit Atlassian: almost free if you're small, very expensive if
you are not.

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peteretep
That sounds more like Github's Enterprise product, which used to be a cliff of
a few thousand bucks to fall off, where private Bitbucket is a $1/user/month.
Maybe Github's pricing is less unusual now.

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BillinghamJ
Github is still incredibly expensive, for both Enterprise and Github.com.

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bahador
Huzzah! Excited to use Atlas on my current project. We're supposed to come
onsite to talk with Kevin next week. Looking forward!

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mrmrcoleman
Congrats Mitchell + Anand + Kevin + team!

Now send someone to softwarecircus.io to talk about it!

