Achieving the Atlantis Workflow with Spacelift

The article discusses the value of applying changes before merging in a Terraform environment and introduces Atlantis, an open-source tool for automating Terraform deployments. It highlights Atlantis' limitations, such as its reliance on pull requests and lack of native scalable means for managing dependencies across Terraform deployments. The article then presents Spacelift, a more flexible management platform for infrastructure as code that supports various tools and languages, including Terraform, AWS CloudFormation, Pulumi, and Kubernetes. It explains how to use Spacelift's promote functionality to achieve pre-merge apply workflow and manage dependencies using trigger policies with labels. The author concludes by emphasizing the importance of infrastructure automation and encourages readers to explore Spacelift as an alternative to homegrown solutions on top of a generic CI/CD tool.