Show HN: Bootstrapped Terraform Orchestration in OCaml
by sausagefeet | 2025-09-09 11:51:53+00:00
We are Malcolm and Josh, two engineers who wanted to bootstrap a business after reading the book Company of One. (If you haven't read it, it is a great book about building something sustainable instead of chasing exponential growth.) We never set out to build a Terraform company. We just wanted independence, a lifestyle business, and ended up here.

Terrateam is an open source tool that runs Terraform plans and applies inside pull requests. Think of it as Terraform orchestration designed to handle large monorepos and flexible workflows.

A few years ago we were trying to figure out how to start a company. We did not want VC money. We wanted independence and something sustainable, even if it grew slowly. That was the goal.

We tried a bunch of things first, Package Depot, Curl Bash, and something called "Hosted Atlantis." None of it really worked. But Terraform kept coming back into the picture. Honestly, we were not superfans. Writing HCL all day never excited us. But the orchestration problems around Terraform were unavoidable. Atlantis (the default OSS solution) would choke on monorepos. Terraform Cloud was expensive and rigid. GitHub Actions were brittle. We knew these were real pain points.

So we started building Terrateam. At first it was basically "Atlantis in OCaml" because I like writing OCaml and the type system gave me confidence in big refactors. Looking back, we tried to do too much at once and we did not differentiate clearly. But over time, we have figured it out.

What works well with Terrateam:

Monorepos, thanks to a tag system that lets you target the lowest possible piece of your infrastructure with custom workflows, policies, and access controls. We have teams running Terrateam across enormous repos with tens of thousands of directories, and the tag system keeps runs isolated and manageable Everything runs directly in PRs with no required UI. We think extra dashboards are an unnecessary context switch, although we still provide one when PRs are too constrained We are bootstrapped, for profit, and open source. Most of our competitors are closed source, VC funded, and focused on large enterprise. We are aiming at the mid-market instead. These are the teams that need orchestration, but do not want to spend six figures, talk about it in budget meetings. or divert engineers to build and maintain their own system. Terraform orchestration is important enough to pay for, but not the kind of problem most teams should be building and maintaining themselves.

As for AI, we do not yet know where it fits. Today we believe orchestration is still a human workflow, with people reviewing plans, enforcing policies, and approving changes. Maybe AI augments that in the future, but our focus is on making the fundamentals reliable right now. Infrastructure changes should be intentional.

Getting noticed is still the hardest part. We do not have a big marketing budget. We are not the default open source choice because Atlantis still is. But we have built something that real teams use in production, and we think the engineering and business problems here are interesting enough to be worth sharing.

Repo: https://github.com/terrateamio/terrateam

We would love feedback, especially from others who have tried to bootstrap infra tools, thought about GTM for devtools, or fought Terraform at scale.