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The Terraform Maturity Journey

Every team using Terraform goes through a similar evolution as their infrastructure grows. This is normal, expected, and part of the learning process. Atmos helps you skip the painful parts by providing proven patterns from day one.

A Common Path​

If you're using Terraform, you've probably experienced—or will soon experience—a familiar progression. It typically goes something like this:

Stage 1: You start simple, maybe managing a single AWS account with a few Terraform files.

Stage 2: You add another environment. Dev and prod are basically the same, right? Copy-paste works... for now.

Stage 3: You need multiple regions. And multiple accounts. Suddenly copy-paste doesn't scale.

Stage 4: Someone discovers Terraform modules. Progress! But now you're managing module versions across dozens of places.

Stage 5: You realize you need a better way to share configuration. .tfvars files everywhere.

Sound familiar? This is the natural evolution of infrastructure complexity. Every team goes through it.

Why This Happens​

When you start with Terraform, you're learning infrastructure-as-code. The last thing you need is a complicated framework.

So you keep it simple. And simple works great... until it doesn't.

The problem isn't Terraform. Terraform is powerful and flexible. The problem is configuration management at scale. As you add more:

  • Environments (dev, staging, prod, DR...)
  • Regions (us-east-1, eu-west-1, ap-southeast-1...)
  • Accounts (per-team, per-product, shared services...)
  • Teams (platform, security, data, ML...)

Your configuration becomes exponentially more complex than your code.

This is where most teams realize they need a framework.

How Atmos Helps​

Just like you wouldn't build a web app without React or Rails, you don't have to build Terraform infrastructure without a framework.

Atmos provides:

  • Proven patterns - Organizational conventions that scale from 1 to 100+ accounts
  • Configuration as data - YAML-based configs separate from Terraform code
  • DRY architecture - Import and inherit configuration, write it once
  • Component library approach - Reuse infrastructure patterns across teams
  • Enterprise-ready - Built for multi-account, multi-region, multi-cloud complexity

The Journey Without Atmos​

From Cloud Posse's experience working with startups to Fortune 100 companies, here's the typical journey we see teams take when using Terraform without a framework.

You don't have to go through all these stages. Atmos lets you skip directly to the end state.

Start at the Destination

You can skip this entire journey by using Atmos from the start. 😎

Where Are You on the Journey?​

Recognizing your current stage helps you understand what challenges to expect and how Atmos can help.