How Terramate Can Improve Your Infrastructure Management

As part of a once-in-a-generation shift to the cloud, Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) tools such as Terraform, OpenTofu, Pulumi, and CrossPlane allow organizations of all sizes to provision and manage cloud infrastructure more efficiently.

However, adopting IaC creates a set of new challenges: complex configurations and pipelines, operational bottlenecks, and issues related to security, reliability, and cost.

Without a proper system to automate, manage and guard your infrastructure configurations, projects can quickly spiral out of control.

This is where Infrastructure as Code (IaC) orchestration platforms shine, providing the required processes and tools to align all your configurations and automation - meet Terramate.

Here’s what we will cover in this article:

What is Terramate, and who is it for?
Terramate benefits
Terramate features
How Terramate differentiates from other approaches

What is Terramate?

Terramate is an Infrastructure as Code orchestration and observability platform that enables your team to provision and manage infrastructure faster and more securely without sacrificing control, flexibility and security. Terramate delivers robust features, including:

Environments: Manage large-scale environments efficiently by breaking them up into smaller units called stacks, limiting risk by lowering the blast radius of changes. This approach also significantly reduces cost and waiting times by allowing for up to 90% faster pipelines that run in parallel.
Code Generation: Lower the time invested in writing and maintaining infrastructure code using Terramate’s code generation approach, which helps remove code duplication and manual processes for module or provider updates.
Automation Workflows: Boost reliability, productivity and collaboration with GitOps automation workflows that are CI/CD agnostic and fully customizable.
Observability and Visibility: Keep an overview of all changes, detect and remediate drift, monitor your entire infrastructure footprint among teams and projects, and easily spot and resolve misconfiguration to keep control and avoid failures.
Developer Self-Service: Enable non-expert users to provision and manage production-grade infrastructure without having to know tools such as Terraform or Terramate in detail.

By integrating Terramate into your processes, you gain visibility, predictability and much better control of your organization’s cloud usage.

Cloud usage Terramate is tool agnostic and can be added to existing projects and architecture without causing migration efforts or lock-in. It is the perfect starting point for any greenfield project or supercharging existing and large brownfield environments.

Terramate was built to enable Platform- and DevOps engineering teams. Still, it became the go-to platform for engineering teams because they can increase their velocity with self-service infrastructure that implements all your organization’s guardrails. It greatly enhances collaboration among engineers, offering them a central location to make infrastructure-related decisions.

Terramate Benefits

Terramate helps organizations build platforms for deploying, managing and observing infrastructure by integrating seamlessly with all your favorite tools, such as GitHub or Slack. It allows you to build swift, robust workflows that streamline your infrastructure automation without sacrificing the necessary guardrails that keep you safe.

With Terramate, developers can focus on new feature development rather than infrastructure, offering them self-serve templates pre-approved by the DevOps/Platform engineering teams.

Terramate offers the following benefits:

Improve your team’s productivity

Amplified Developer Velocity: Enable developer self-service with blueprints, scaffolding and golden paths, allowing your Platform and DevOps teams to encode their expertise and your organization’s non-negotiables into pre-approved self-service infrastructure powered by the IaC tools you already know.
Unlimited Flexibility: With Terramate, you have full flexibility. You can use any approach to managing environments, bring whatever tooling you might need, and prefer and build workflows customized to your needs while still keeping full control.
Bring your own tooling: Leverage the compute and access model of your existing CI/CD, such as GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, BitBucket Pipelines, Azure DevOps and others. Integrate any existing tooling and architecture without sacrificing control and flexibility.
Multi-IaC and Unification: Unlock multi-IaC use cases while monitoring and observing all your infrastructure, configurations and workflows in a single platform

Keep your infrastructure secure

Full control: Terramate CLI is the component of Terramate that runs locally or within your existing general-purpose CI/CD. That way, you remain 100% in control.
Simplify toolchain: You do not need any state-locking software or any infrastructure-specific CI/CD platforms anymore.
Best in class security: Terramate Cloud is the only solution that does not require access to your source code, state backend, or cloud account. The way Terramate Cloud receives data is if you push redacted metadata from plan files with Terramate CLI, which, again, you fully control. This way, Terramate fits well into high-security environments.

Keep your infra practice safe

Full observability & visibility: Get real-time insights into your entire infrastructure footprint across all cloud accounts & IaC repos.
Audit trail: Understand every single change introduced in Pull Requests and deployments and how these relate to your team.
Drift and misconfiguration detection: Detect failed deployments, drifts, and misconfiguration and ensure immediate remediation.
Auto-assign incidents: Ensure that alerts regarding unhealthy stacks are automatically assigned to the right team members - through the Pull Request association - and are forwarded to the right messaging app. So they will get acted upon.

How Terramate differentiates from other approaches

Partial approaches don’t work

As mentioned earlier in this article, adopting Infrastructure as Code introduces several challenges. Most vendors only partially mitigate those, leading organizations to adopt multiple vendors and tools combined into fragile DYI solutions that often don’t scale. Terramate takes a different approach, as we provide an end-to-end platform that helps you simplify the management of your entire IaC lifecycle.

end-to-end platform

The case for general-purpose CI/CD over “purpose-built” ones

Most other vendors in the market offer so-called “purpose-built” CI/CD platforms for IaC. The key argument for this is that due to the stateful nature of infrastructure, general-purpose build CI/CD alternatives lack the required capabilities.

While there was merit to this point when the idea first came out, the truth is that general-purpose CI/CD (such as, e.g., GitHub Actions, GitLab CI/CD, BitBucket) have come a long way and are now perfectly capable of deploying stateful infrastructure, especially when paired with capable orchestration tools such as Terramate. Given that these widely adopted general-purpose platforms provide a better developer experience - and chances are your developers already have lots of experience with them - it makes sense to take advantage of their cost-effectiveness and the benefits of simplifying your toolchain, thereby reducing complexity.

Terramate, therefore, is not a CI/CD but a powerful orchestrator that enables you to run even complex infrastructure deployments within your existing CI/CD. Build sophisticated automation, drift checks, and GItOps workflows and save yourself the hassle of dealing with a purpose-built platform—especially as these tools are inherent security headaches because they require broad access to critical components such as state backend, cloud accounts and code.

Terramate Principles

When we first designed Terramate, we defined a list of principles that are strictly considered and incorporated when we build products:

Terramate will support any IaC Tooling as an engine (Terraform, OpenTofu, Terragrunt, Pulumi, etc.)
Using Terramate allows teams to stay with native infrastructure code. Unlike commonly known wrappers such as Terragrunt, we don’t force teams to shift to another syntax.
Using Terramate doesn’t require migration effort (living side-by-side with legacy setups).
Terramate allows you to seamlessly integrate with existing GitOps workflows and run in the CI/CD of your choice.
Users have full control over what will be sent to and managed in the Cloud.

Building on these principles allowed us to create the most secure and flexible solution in the market. It can be added to any existing brownfield environment within minutes, compared to other platforms that often take weeks or even months to be fully onboarded and adopted.

Summary

Terramate provides developer self-service to help your platform teams stay in control while increasing developer velocity. Provision, configure, and govern with a single automated workflow to deliver secure, cost-effective, high-performance infrastructure.

Building multi-tool-dependent workflows has always been challenging, but solving infrastructure-related problems such as scaling, observability, and flexibility is now within reach. Integrating various tools seamlessly into your workflow allows you to streamline operations, automate repetitive tasks, and ensure your systems are resilient and adaptive to changing demands.

If you want to start using Terramate, sign up for a free account today or book a demo with one of our solutions engineers.

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