Atlantis is a self-hosted Go service that runs as a long-lived process inside your network, acting as the execution layer for Terraform and OpenTofu operations triggered by pull request events. It communicates with your VCS platform via webhooks and posts plan and apply output back to the originating PR as comments.
Atlantis does not store Terraform state. State management stays with whatever backend you configure (S3, GCS, Terraform Cloud, etc.). The process needs network access to your VCS platform, your state backend, and your cloud provider APIs. Cloud provider credentials are supplied via environment variables or IAM role binding on the host.
Plan files are stored on disk between the plan and apply steps, which is why a Kubernetes StatefulSet with persistent storage is the recommended deployment path rather than a Deployment. v0.42.0 shipped in April 2026; the project carries approximately 8,900 GitHub stars under Apache 2.0 and holds bi-weekly CNCF community calls.
