Choose a deployment tool
UDS offers several ways to deploy and manage applications. The right workflow depends on how your team plans, releases, and operates UDS software.
UDS Tofu Provider
Section titled “UDS Tofu Provider”Use the UDS Tofu Provider when Terraform or OpenTofu already manages your environment and you want UDS applications to participate in the same infrastructure-as-code workflow, including shared values, dependencies, state, and automation. Choose this path when you do not need to store applications as bundles.
Fleet tooling
Section titled “Fleet tooling”Use Fleet tooling when you need to distribute, deploy, and manage UDS software across a fleet of systems, especially when deployments need centralized management, disconnected or edge support, or a simplified operator experience. Fleet tooling manages individual Zarf package deployments rather than Bundles Next artifacts.
Fleet is a premium offering. Contact Defense Unicorns to learn more.
UDS CLI Next
Section titled “UDS CLI Next”Use UDS CLI Next when you want to directly create, deploy, and manage UDS from the command line. This is the general-purpose UDS-native workflow when you do not specifically need an infrastructure-as-code or Fleet-managed workflow. Next is currently an alpha preview.
Existing bundles
Section titled “Existing bundles”Use Legacy UDS CLI for existing uds-bundle.yaml workflows while Next remains in alpha. Legacy will eventually be deprecated as Next matures.
Related documentation
Section titled “Related documentation”- UDS CLI overview - installation and command navigation.
- OpenTofu documentation - configuration, plans, applies, and state.