[mitchellh]

Great feedback. We've heard this and we've been making strides to improve it. For the most part, this is largely our own doing: we didn't do a good job at all of marketing Atlas to the open source community. There are various reasons for this, including not wanting the community to feel we were pushing commercializing onto them. Another reason is that as Atlas was in tech preview, we wanted to build more features and stabilize on the features we had. But we're carefully learning what the boundaries are and are spreading them a bit more.

If you're an open source user, the first thing that you can do is just go to atlas.hashicorp.com and see the features we add on top of the project you're already using. We now break down features by project being augmented.

Example: Vagrant augmentation: https://atlas.hashicorp.com/learn/vagrant

We have pages like that for all our tools.

We'll continue to improve this! Thanks for the feedback.

EDIT: Sorry, I was answering "why don't I know what Atlas is" versus the answer that was expected for "what is Atlas". The best answer for that is to use the homepage and click on the product (Vagrant, Packer, etc.) you use the most! http://atlas.hashicorp.com

[tptacek]

I'm interested but still not clear on what this is. And: I'm one of those people that periodically makes a point of reloading your website to see if you're doing something else interesting. I've seen "Atlas" for awhile. Still no idea what it is.

So is Atlas the "Pro" versions of your core offerings?

Or is it something else, a single coherent product that changes the way I'd interact with Vagrant, &c? Is it like Packer As A Service? Does it host images I make with Packer? Is it a centralized Consul repository?

I think it's the "managed nodes" pricing model (which is fine, don't get me wrong) that makes me confused about what the offering is.

[mitchellh]

Sorry, let me answer that.

Atlas is two things: enhancements to individual open source projects ("pro" version if that helps), and a unification between our projects to give a full dev to prod pipeline.

Per open source project we have, it adds features on top of it we felt didn't fit within the scope of the open source project itself. Example: Vagrant box hosting, Vagrant share (requires a server), Packer builds, Packer artifact hosting, Consul UI, Consul alerts, Consul alert history, Terraform collaboration, Terraform state storage, Terraform run locks, GitHub triggering Terraform, etc. These are all features that enhance an individual HashiCorp project. I'm not going to explain each here, since they're explained in the blog post and of course expect an understanding of that individual project.

Then, Atlas unifies them: code push (Git, CI, etc.) triggers an automatic Packer build which triggers a Terraform plan which triggers a Slack message asking for approval to deploy which can then be deployed with a single button which then causes the Consul UI to update with the latest info.

You can do this with our open source, purely, and many do. This was the inspiration behind Atlas: the companies adopting our open source projects want a complete story, and they're building it on their own, but they'd rather buy it from us. Atlas is us delivering that full dev to prod story.

If you're a HashiCorp user, Atlas is valuable if you're using an indivual project OR if you're looking for a complete deployment solution.

I hope this helps a lot more.

[tptacek]

Yup. Neato!

[BillinghamJ]

You wrote a fairly long reply, but failed to actually say anything whatsoever about what Atlas is...

[alberth]

mitchellh, you still haven't answered what is Atlas even after your edit. I think is a safe assumption that people have in fact visited your web site and as such are still asking the question what does this do.

If you note, this is the #1 voted comment and you still have not answered the question.

So please take this as an opportunity clarify succinctly what Atlas does and also push your team towards updating your web site.

[n42]

What makes me sad is that they have been iterating on the site heavily over the past six months, yet they're still dealing with a large amount of confusion about what Atlas even does. I am all in on the Hashicorp stack (we use Vagrant, Packer, Terraform and Consul) and really want this product to succeed, but I am still confused about why I would use it.

edit: as far as I can tell, Atlas is designed for teams to better coordinate infrastructure changes. You can see when someone is building new images in Packer, or deploying changes via Terraform. You can audit these changes, and avoid conflicts

[res0nat0r]

Atlas is just a unifying web UI for all of their other products, and provides a nice overview for your infrastructure.

I think the screenshots on the homepage can explain what it does easier than anything else.