Terraform (Atmos) Accelerator

An opinionated, multi-cloud, multi-region, best-practice accelerator for Terraform

Originally developed internally by the Platform Engineers at Slalom Build, based on our experience building enterprise-grade Terraform for customers. We decided to open source this accelerator to empower other engineers, encourage contributions and work more collaboratively with customers.

🎯 Project goals

1. Stop re-inventing the wheel! Create a repository that can be used to quickly provision resources in AWS, Azure and GCP. The approach must be -

   1. scalable - scaling from one small group of resources in one region to many resources, in multiple accounts, in multiple regions should not be difficult or overly complex
   2. maintainable - the structure should be logical, code should be DRY and straightforward, no hacks
   3. extensible - the patterns used should enable others to a) easily extend existing code, and b) create their own implementations
   4. well-tested - no explanation required hopefully!
   5. not just our best practice - follow Terraform best practices as closely as possible. See naming conventions and code structure

2. Standardize creation of the following basic resources (and more as the need is discovered), with the understanding that they will be further customized for every use case (reference):

   Service type	AWS	Google Cloud	Azure
   Virtual networking	VPC	Virtual Private Cloud	Azure Virtual Network
   DNS	Route 53	Cloud DNS	Azure DNS
   Virtual machines	EC2	Compute Engine	Azure Virtual Machines
   Autoscaling	AutoScaling Groups	Compute Engine AutoScaler	Azure Autoscale, Azure Virtual Machine Scale Sets
   Load balancing	Application Load Balancing	Cloud Load Balancing	Azure Load Balancer
   Auditing	CloudTrail	Cloud Audit Logs	Azure Audit Logs
   Monitoring	CloudWatch	Cloud Monitoring	Azure Monitor
   Policy enforcement	AWS Config	Compute Resource Policy	Azure Policy
   Parallel task execution	SQS, SNS	Cloud Tasks	Azure Service Bus, Azure Storage Queues
   Terraform state storage	S3 & DynamoDB	Cloud Datastore	Azure Storage

3. Create integration tests for every module we create and use

4. Create a robust CI/CD pipeline for end-to-end deployment and testing of infrastructure code

5. Build a community of maintainers and contributors for as long as the accelerator remains useful

6. Manage vulnerabilities to improve the overall security posture of solutions based on the accelerator

🤔 When to use the terraform accelerator (or not)

This accelerator is best suited for:

• Managing multiple environments on a medium/large/enterprise scale
• Multi-region cloud deployments
• Hybrid (multi-cloud) deployments
• Terraform automation and collaboration, to enable team autonomy and enable multiple teams to own infrastructure
• Brown-field development (bring your own landing zones)

When you should pass on this accelerator:

• If you need to use Terraform Cloud as a back-end (atmos doesn't support it yet)
• If your terraform is very simple and likely won't grow in complexity

🧬 Project structure

.
├── .github                         # GitHub workflows and repo config
├── .vscode                         # VSCode settings
├── components                     
│   └── terraform                   # Terraform components
│       ├── aws                     
│       ├── azure                   
│       └── gcp                     
├── config                          # Atmos configuration files
│   ├── aws                         
│   │   └── atmos.yaml
│   ├── azure
│   │   └── atmos.yaml
│   └── gcp
│       └── atmos.yaml
├── docs                            # Project documentation
├── examples                        # Example configs and stacks
│   ├── config
│   └── stacks
└── stacks                          # Atmos stack configurations
    ├── aws                         # AWS stack definitions
    │   ├── automation
    │   ├── catalog                 
    │   ├── dev
    │   ├── prod
    │   └── staging
    ├── azure                       # Azure stack definitions
    │   └── dev
    └── gcp                         # GCP stack definitions
        └── dev

💬 Talk to us!

We host a community chat every Tuesday at 11am (Vancouver/Pacific Time), where we talk about the accelerator, recent and upcoming changes, feature requests, etc. Please join us https://bit.ly/terraform-accelerator-chat

🫶 Contributing

Contributions are always welcome! Fork this repository, make your changes, submit a PR. You know how it works.

🐛 Support

Raise an issue via Github. Or if you're part of the Slalom Build team, contact us internally via our #terraform-accelerator channel.

---

License

Copyright © 2023 Slalom LLC.

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.