HashiCorp, a San Francisco–based start-up founded in 2012, has recently released its first commercial product, called Atlas. HashiCorp is known by many people as the creator of a number of open-source tools that assist in developing, deploying, and maintaining applications. One major challenge for IT shops is that so many tools are required to automate the building and delivery of software that engineers spend far too much time trying to tie all of these tools together, which takes away time from working on business requests. In many shops, one or more people may be dedicated to managing the complexities of the DevOps tool chain, which includes integration, patching, upgrading, and many other non–value added tasks. With Atlas, engineers can leverage a single tool for managing infrastructure and builds with a common workflow and a central dashboard.
HashiCorp takes a page from the Atlassian playbook. Atlassian focuses on integrating a collection of open-source tools for agile development, such as JIRA, Confluence, HipChat, and others. HashiCorp brings together a collection of open-source tools to aid in the delivery and management of applications and infrastructure. Atlas is made up of five major functions, as represented in the following image:
Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, and Consul are all open-source projects that you can download and use for free today. Atlas provides a common platform that makes all of these open-source solutions work together seamlessly and is delivered as SaaS. In addition, Atlas handles the integrations with various CI/CD tools (Maven, Jenkins, etc.), containers and VMs (Docker, VMware, VirtualBox, and eventually Rocket), version control (GitHub and Bitbucket), configuration management (Chef, Puppet, Ansible, and Salt), public cloud providers (AWS, Google, Rackspace and Azure), and private cloud providers (OpenStack and SoftLayer). Doing these integrations yourself would require a significant amount of time and money, and it would be a never-ending task to keep everything current. Atlas provides these capabilities out of the box and will continue to add integrations as the demand for new tools arises.
Many organizations live in a multicloud world. I have seen where engineers have written thousands upon thousands of lines of code in Chef or Puppet, trying to manage the many permutations of cloud endpoints, applications stacks, and containers and VMs. Tools like Atlas to allow you to build a common workflow that can deliver a Docker container to AWS in the same way in which you could deliver a VM to a private cloud without major development. The goal of Atlas is to simplify the process of getting code from development to production by making infrastructure management and application delivery easier.
The company also announced $10 million in Series A funding from Mayfield, GGV Capital, and True Ventures.