Atmos Terraform Orchestration

Atmos wraps the Terraform CLI to provide stack-aware orchestration of infrastructure operations. Instead of manually managing workspaces, backends, variable files, and authentication for each Terraform component, Atmos resolves the full configuration from stack manifests and handles all of these concerns automatically.

How Atmos Orchestrates Terraform

When you run any atmos terraform command, Atmos performs the following sequence:

1. Resolves stack configuration -- Reads and deep-merges all stack manifests to produce the fully resolved configuration for the target component in the target stack.
2. Generates backend configuration -- Writes a backend.tf.json file in the component directory with the correct backend settings (S3 bucket, key, region, etc.) derived from the stack config.
3. Generates variable file -- Writes a terraform.tfvars.json file containing all vars defined for the component in the stack.
4. Provisions backend infrastructure -- If provision.backend.enabled: true, creates the backend storage (e.g., S3 bucket) before Terraform init.
5. Runs terraform init -- Initializes the working directory with the generated backend config. Cleans