Atlas provides one single workflow for application delivery. Built by Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator of Vagrant, it is HashiCorp’s first commercial offer. It builds on HashiCorp’s OpenSource tools Vagrant, Packer, Serf, Consul, and Terraform which have been downloaded more than one million times already.
HashiCorp announced $10 million series A funding as well. Mayfield, GGV Capital and True Ventures back HashiCorp to support rapid growth of the team to enhance Atlas and keep supporting millions of existing users.
With Atlas, users can define the development environment, the build process, and how to deploy the application. Atlas integrates with various popular tools for Continuous Integration, Containers and VMs, Version Control, Configuration Management, and Cloud Providers.
Atlas simplifies the development and deployment workflow by providing a unified set of commands independent of the underlying tools and technologies. vagrant up builds a development environment and vagrant push deploys any application. The Atlas console enables users to maintain, monitor and auto-scale their infrastructure.
InfoQ had the opportunity to speak to Mitchell Hashimoto, creator of Vagrant and co-founder and CEO HashiCorp:
InfoQ: What are the personas that will use Atlas? Mainly devs, mainly ops?
Atlas is a cross-organizational tool that is built specifically to span devs, ops, compliance, reliability, and security roles. That being said, we expect adoption to come from one role and spread to others.
Historically, our adoption is from one of two sources: developers via Vagrant or operators via Consul. We expect this will continue with Atlas: you want development environments, or you want deploys/monitoring. As the users discover the utility, they'll expand into more areas.
InfoQ: What are the main competitors for Atlas? Or, putting it another way, are there any other tools (or combination of...) that have some kind of overlap with Atlas?
Feature for feature, the closest overlap with Atlas is vSphere. We make all the same promises, but go above and promise to work across any infrastructure (VMware, AWS, Docker, etc.).
InfoQ: What’s missing from typical continuous delivery solutions today built with e.g. Jenkins?
Depends how you're using the CD tool, but most focus on the "build stage" in the Atlas how-to diagram. The major difference is that Atlas provisions the servers on AWS, DigitalOcean, OpenStack, etc - while Jenkins just puts the newly built artifacts on the servers that are provisioned elsewhere. Additionally Atlas has "runtime" features for service discovery and service monitoring.
InfoQ: If an organization is comitted to, say, AWS, what does it have to gain by using Atlas?
A consistent workflow for all their application choices: languages, container runtimes, OSes, etc. With Atlas, every application is "vagrant up" to develop, "vagrant push" to deploy.
And, if you ever want to give another infrastructure provider a try, such as Google Compute Engine, then the benefit becomes immediately clear.
InfoQ: How big is the team behind Atlas? How long has Atlas been in development?
It's a seven person team. In terms of development, that's tricky because the constituent open source pieces have been in development since 2010. The integration of those tools with Atlas has been in development for several months.
InfoQ: What changes in the way we manage data centers and software development and deployment do you see coming?
The major trend we see coming is the commodification of infrastructure. Meaning that if you can setup your application once and can deploy it anywhere, the infrastructure underneath is just a utility like electricity, water, etc.