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Stage 0: ClickOps

ClickOps is the "art" of provisioning or setting up your infrastructure using the click of the mouse, aimed at the web console of your chosen cloud provider.

Think of ClickOps as the sketching phase of designing your cloud infrastructure — it’s a way to quickly and visually design how your setup should look without investing the time to codify it as formal blueprints. Initially, ClickOps is often the fastest way to get up and running, allowing you to understand your infrastructure through hands-on experimentation.

However, just as sketches aren’t used to construct buildings, you need blueprints for a successful, repeatable implementation. These blueprints ensure that any team member can reproduce the setup accurately. Although, sometimes ClickOps is unavoidable because the underlying APIs aren’t available, or a Terraform resource isn’t available by a provider; most of the time, infrastructure can and should be codified.

New Problems
  1. No consistency or reproducibility
  2. Repetitive error-prone work
  3. No history of changes

The biggest problem with ClickOps is reproducibility. No self-respecting engineer enjoys repetitive work and visually comparing two configurations or spot-checking two environments side-by-side in the web console. These issues disappear when you adopt infrastructure as code (IaC). IaC provides the blueprints for consistent, automated, and scalable infrastructure management, eliminating the pitfalls of manual, repetitive ClickOps processes.

Realization​

So developers begin their journey with Terraform, a tool that allows them to define their infrastructure as code,

Try Atmos!