Have you ever wondered what other Terraform Cloud alternatives are out there? Check out env0. You will find very interesting features for a solid Infrastructure as Code platform for your organization. This post is sponsored by env0.
Video
Below is a video explanation and demo.
Video Chapters
In this video, we look at env0, an alternative to Terraform Cloud. We will build an AWS EC2 instance hosting a Jenkins Docker container. We will use env0’s custom flows to get Ansible and Terraform working together to achieve all of this.
You can skip to the relevant timestamps below:
- 00:00 – Introduction
- 01:49 – Why TACOS?
- 04:42 – Demo – Structure Overview
- 08:02 – Demo – Create a Template
- 12:45 – Demo – RBAC
- 15:03 – Demo – Run an Environment Deployment
- 18:30 – Demo – Cost Estimation
- 19:20 – Demo – Organization Settings
- 22:05 – Demo – Custom Flows
- 25:46 – Demo – Jenkins Deployed
- 26:18 – Demo – TTL To Destroy Environment
- 28:11 – Demo – env0.yml Configuration
- 29:42 – Other env0 Features
- 31:19 – Wrap-up

Overview
If you’ve reached a point at your organization where you’re looking to scale and standardize on Terraform, then you need to look beyond Terraform open-source.
Check out env0. It’s a solid Infrastructure as Code platform.
Below are the main features that you would want to look for beyond OSS:
– Scaling Terraform for Organizations
– Secure Remote State Management
– Secrets and Variables
– RBAC
– SSO
– Policy as Code for Governance
– Private Module Registry (Store Reusable Terraform Modules)
– Cost Estimation
– Automatic Drift Detection
env0 has these features and more. Follow along in this blog post to see a demo of the following:
- Structure Overview (Organizations, Projects, Templates, Environments)
- RBAC
- Custom Workflow (Terraform + Ansible to build a Jenkins Container in an EC2 Instance)
- Automatic Destruction of the Environment based on a TTL
Code
Pre-requisites
The following is required to follow along:
- A free GitLab account
- Access to an AWS account, we’ll be running within the 12 months free tier
- A free env0 account
What we’ll build
In this post we will build an AWS EC2 instance with Terraform and use Ansible to install the docker engine in it and then run a Jenkins container. We will leverage envzero’s custom flows to get Terraform and Ansible to work together to build this for us.
This is a use case where we would like to quickly build a Jenkins machine for testing purposes and rely on env0 to destroy the machine automatically based on a time-to-live (TTL). This TTL is a welcomed feature that helps reduce cost in case we forget the machine on.

Create a Template in env0
A template defines an environment that can be deployed. The same template can be used to launch multiple environments, under different projects. This is useful for a center of excellence or a DevOps team to create certain approved templates and developers are only allowed to use these templates. Developers don’t have the privilege to create templates. This is very helpful for self-serve models to speed up developer productivity while adhering to company governance and policies.

Notice how in the above image, env0 allows you to not only create Terraform templates, but also other Infrastructure as Code templates from other providers. This is a differentiator for envzero.
Also as expected, env0 follows gitOps principles and ties in with version control systems. In our example we’ve tied the template to GitLab. Another neat feature of env0 is it’s ability to load variables from the Terraform code itself so you don’t have to type the variables yourself. Below is a screenshot showing that:

Now go ahead and create a template. For details on how to create this template please refer to the demo video above.
Create an Environment
Now that you’ve created a template, it’s time to create a new environment based on this template. Go to Project Environments
and click CREATE NEW ENVIRONMENT
button. You’ll get the option to build it directly from VCS or from a template. Choose template.

This will take you to the Project Templates
section where you can click Run Now
to deploy the template.

RBAC and Slack Notifications
Once the developer, Sameh Gabrail
, deploys the environment from the Jenkins Container in EC2
template we start getting Slack notifications. You can see these notifications in the screenshot below.

Notice how the deployment is waiting on approval. Sameh Gabrail
has the planner role which doesn’t allow him to approve his own deployments. Sam Gabrail
who is an admin approves this deployment. For more information on user roles in a project, refer to the documentation.
Also, notice the estimated cost change is +12.92$. Another great feature of env0 is it’s ability to not only estimate actual cost, but also to monitor cloud costs over time.
Our Custom Flow Explained
env0 allows different hooks at different phases of a Terraform run. This is very useful for integrations with third-party tools such as checkov for security or to integrate with Ansible as in our case. What you need is to define a file called env0.yml
and place it in the root directory of your repo. Check the different hooks for terraform in the documentation.
Below is the folder structure:

env0.yml file:
version: 1 deploy: steps: terraformOutput: after: - terraform output -raw private_key > /tmp/myKey.pem - chmod 400 /tmp/myKey.pem - sed -i "s/<placeholder_app>/$(terraform output -raw public_ip)/g" Ansible/inventory - pip3 install --user ansible - ls -lah - cat Ansible/inventory - cd Ansible && ansible-playbook --private-key /tmp/myKey.pem -i inventory jenkinsPlaybook.yaml
Notice the env0.yml
code above. This is where we get env0’s agent to grab the EC2 instance’s private key and place it in a myKey.pem
file so that Ansible can later use it to access the instance. We also use sed
to replace the <placeholder_app>
with the terraform output for the EC2 instance’s public IP in Ansible’s inventory file.
Then we use pip to install ansible as it’s not available in the env0 agent. We then run ls
and cat the inventory file to verify all is working, we can really omit these two lines. They are only helpful for troubleshooting.
Finally, we run the ansible-playbook
from within the Ansible folder to run the jenkinsPlaybook
playbook. You can check out the Ansible and Terraform code here.
Conclusion
In this post, we learned about env0 and how it is a great Terraform Cloud alternative.
We also saw how to use env0 to create custom flows that allow us to integrate Terraform with Ansible. Terraform helps with provisioning and Ansible helps with configuration management. The beauty of custom flows from env0 is that it allows us to build everything on env0 without having to rely on another CI/CD platform.
env0 has many other features that fill the gap for organizations looking to standardize on Terraform where Terraform OSS falls short. Check out these features under env0’s pricing plans.
References
Suggested Reading
- Jenkins, Vault, Terraform, Ansible, and Consul Delivering an End-to-End CI/CD Pipeline
- Build a Kubernetes k3s Cluster in vSphere with Terraform and Packer
- AWS Lambda – Terraform Example with API Gateway
- HashiCorp Packer for VMware Ubuntu Templates and Terraform for building VMs
- HashiCorp Packer to Build a Ubuntu 22.04 Image Template in VMware vSphere
- Terraform vs Ansible – Learn the Differences – Part 1