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Though I understand where you're going with "Terraform for X", as someone who gets to deal with terraform on almost daily basis to manage infrastructure this ma

Though I understand where you're going with "Terraform for X", as someone who gets to deal with terraform on almost daily basis to manage infrastructure this makes me instantly want to head for the hills. Terraform is certainly useful and when it works it works. The problem is that when it doesn't, things have a tendency to go horribly wrong. The amount of hours saved by terraform are barely offset by the amount of time spent recovering broken production infrastructure or resolving state issues because it threw in the towel halfway through some operation. That's without even digging into plan and apply discrepancies. So, declarative schema migrations, yay, and market yourself that way. But I would be careful with being "terraform for X". There's a lot of terraform trauma among people who run production systems.

rotemtam 5y ago
Hi daenney (One of Atlas's creators here) Thanks a lot for the feedback. Frankly, we didn't make the Terraform analogy. We didn't even start this thread, just woke up to this wonderful discussion this morning :-) With regards to our marketing material, we only state that our DDL is terraform like because it is based on HCL.. I completely hear you on Terraform and it's pains and I've had my fair share of problems with it myself! This is why our approach to building Atlas is to offer two styles of migrations: declarative migrations (which is what you're seeing now) and a more advanced workflow (which I believe most mature projects will end up using) which we call migration authoring or versioned migrations. This second approach is similar to existing migration tools, with versioned SQL files, up/down direction, etc. In fact, it will work great out of the box with most existing migration tools (such as Flyway, Liquibase etc.) The main difference is that users will be able to use Atlas's fairly advanced migration planner and more advanced features that will be available later this year. So indeed, we're not a terraform for X, though i'm sure that title by whoever chose it brought this topic quite a bit of attention :-)

rotemtam 5y ago

Hi daenney (One of Atlas's creators here) Thanks a lot for the feedback. Frankly, we didn't make the Terraform analogy. We didn't even start this thread, just woke up to this wonderful discussion this morning :-) With regards to our marketing material, we only state that our DDL is terraform like because it is based on HCL.. I completely hear you on Terraform and it's pains and I've had my fair share of problems with it myself! This is why our approach to building Atlas is to offer two styles of migrations: declarative migrations (which is what you're seeing now) and a more advanced workflow (which I believe most mature projects will end up using) which we call migration authoring or versioned migrations. This second approach is similar to existing migration tools, with versioned SQL files, up/down direction, etc. In fact, it will work great out of the box with most existing migration tools (such as Flyway, Liquibase etc.) The main difference is that users will be able to use Atlas's fairly advanced migration planner and more advanced features that will be available later this year. So indeed, we're not a terraform for X, though i'm sure that title by whoever chose it brought this topic quite a bit of attention :-)