This article describes practices relating to internal cloud development projects at the University of St. Thomas and is primarily intended for staff and student employees. It is not related to coursework or external business environments. With the rise of vibe-coding and AI-assisted development, it may be helpful to understand how the university approaches development projects.
- Internal Developer Platforms (IDP) dramatically accelerate application delivery by establishing pre-configured, automated golden paths that eliminate cognitive overload for developers and engineering teams.
- Opinionated platforms makes deliberate choices (often set by the organization) about how things should be done, rather than leaving every decision to the developer.
- DevOps is an approach that encompasses planning, design, implementation, automated testing, and deployment, placing these responsibilities in the hands of the developer.
The University of St. Thomas provides standardized Terraform modules for general deployments and Atlantis templates for serverless deployments.
Why Atlantis?
The Atlantis DevOps Platform was developed for small teams and solo-developer projects, making it a perfect fit for St. Thomas. The Atlantis Platform grew out of the need for an easy-to-use platform with reusable starter code and infrastructure templates to use as the base for serverless projects in the University of St. Thomas Libraries. The platform needed to scale to meet high-traffic demand and be easy to use as an educational tool for onboarding student employees and staff across the university as new projects were developed.
Atlantis quickly became a personal side project and evolved into a full feature set of scripts, templates, starter code, documentation, tutorials, and even an MCP server. It grew alongside university and personal projects that gained ever-increasing complexity, and it became battle-tested, refined, and trusted to carry heavy workloads.
Developed closely with input from developers deploying serverless workloads at the University of St. Thomas, it incorporates many of our unique requirements, along with AWS and industry best practices. It is free and open source, meaning St. Thomas can fork its own copy and extend it as needed.
What Atlantis provides
- Open source repositories that allow developers and engineers to inspect and understand the underlying infrastructure
- Tutorials and documentation to quickly learn and deploy production-ready applications
- Starter code and IaC templates to quickly scaffold production-ready applications
- MCP server useful to both humans and AI to assist in using Atlantis prescribed patterns, code samples, and steering documents
- Best practices and guardrails including tagging, security, pipeline automation, and observability from the start
Chad Kluck, the DevOps/Developer Experience Engineer on the St. Thomas Cloud team recorded an introductory video highlighting Atlantis features.
Getting started
To get started in the St. Thomas cloud environment, an account administrator must set up a SAM configuration repository.
Once the SAM configuration repository is set up, you will be able to quickly create additional repositories, scaffold with starter code, and configure pipelines to deploy a "Hello, World" example in under 8 minutes. Then just build your business logic on top of the starter application.
Chad recorded another video demonstrating how to quickly scaffold and deploy a new project with production-ready guardrails in under 8 minutes.
Deployment pipelines
Atlantis is flexible and versatile, with many configuration options for a variety of use cases, whether you need staged pipelines, cross-account pipelines, multi-stage build-and-deploy pipelines, or pipelines that incorporate AWS CDK, script-based SDKs, or CLI commands from CodeBuild to extend CloudFormation templates.
Learn More
Check out the related Knowledge Base articles to learn more about the benefits of using opinionated platforms and the DevOps and AI-assisted Engineering approach.
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