Scalr
Scalr
June 1, 2021

Announcing Public Beta

By
Sebastian Stadil

Dearest Terraform community, it is with great pleasure that I stand before your virtual selves to publicly present the fruit of the last 18 months of our labor: Scalr, a remote backend for Terraform to compete with Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise.

Why make such a competitor you ask?

First, we believe in competition. Remember 90s Microsoft? Back then, Microsoft was a company so ruthlessly monopolistic that it was parodied in the Simpsons, killed Netscape, and singlehandledly stalled the internet for a decade with the disgrace that is IE6. Competition leads to healthier community outcomes, and we’ve thrown our hat in the ring.

Second, we believe in open standards. Good test coverage accelerates the software lifecycle. Infrastructure as code is no exception. Sentinel was a good first step forward, but luckily Tim and Teemu brought us the Open Policy Agent, an open policy language that is cross-platform and works as well for Terraform as it does for Kubernetes. Scalr believes in open standards, so we’ve integrated with it as a first-class citizen. We’ve also contributed back to the community sample tests to help you automate your pipelines further.

Third, we believe in transparent pricing. We hate it when companies hide their prices behind “Contact Sales”, and force us through a self-serving sales process run by folks whose only interest is to sell us something or convince us that we need something. We believe our job is to inform, and that the decision rests on you. We loathe having to tolerate going through the process only to find out the product is 10x more expensive than we thought, or to be hit with complex pricing designed to squeeze every dollar out of us. At Scalr, we stand against opaque pricing that freely discriminates based on some arbitrary criteria and commit to fully transparent pricing.

Fourth, we believe in abolishing the SSO tax. Single-sign on is a core security requirement, not a luxury as Rob Chahin eloquently puts it at SSO.tax. Enough said. At Scalr, there is no surcharge on any paid plan for extra security.

Fifth and finally, we believe you shouldn’t be charged for idle users. That colleague you invited a few months back but never signed in? No charge for her. That former contractor that helped last year? No charge for him. Do we really want to be forced to do regular user cleanups and all the communication coordination required? No longer. Scalr only charges for active users, as defined by activity such as a login or an API call in the last 30 days. Past that, there is no charge for the user until active again.

We’re infinitely grateful to Mitchell and Armon for giving us Terraform, which we consider the de facto standard for infrastructure-as-code based provisioning despite it not being in the hands of an independent software foundation. We’re grateful, and wish to make our own addition to the community with an alternative to Terraform Cloud based on open standards, with transparent pricing, with an abolished SSO tax, and which only charges you for active users.

Getting started is easy.

Sign up for an account here. A special promo plan is available for folks who would like to embark with us on this journey now to enable application teams to own infrastructure operations. This plan will only be available during the public beta, and anyone on it will be grandfathered in through 2023.

Edit Nov 4th: updated calculation of an active user from active in last 90 days to active in last 30 days

Start using the Terraform platform of the future.

A screenshot of the modules page in the Scalr Platform