March 2019 Summaries

The new book, titled "The Art of Cloud Computing", is written by Roger Berlind and published on March 27th, 2019. It provides an in-depth look at cloud computing concepts, including migration, security, scalability, and cost management. The book covers both public and private clouds, as well as hybrid cloud models, offering insights into the benefits and challenges of adopting a cloud-first approach. Berlind shares his expertise gained from working with numerous organizations to help them navigate the complexities of cloud computing, providing practical advice and real-world examples to support the learning process.

HashiCorp is a company that provides infrastructure automation software, including Terraform, Vault, Consul, and Nomad. The company has made its products available for public use, allowing developers to automate the management of their infrastructure as code. With this move, HashiCorp is expanding its reach beyond its existing customer base, making its products more accessible to a wider range of organizations and individuals. This development marks an important milestone in the evolution of cloud computing and DevOps practices, highlighting the growing importance of infrastructure automation in modern software development.

HashiCorp is pleased to announce HashiTalks, a virtual event that showcases the community's use of their products. The first all-day virtual event was held in February and received positive feedback from the community. The event featured talks on various topics and recordings are available on HashiCorp's resources page. The success of HashiTalks led to the planning of another event for next year, which will be announced soon. The event aims to foster knowledge sharing among the community members and has been well-received by speakers who have submitted their talks to other conferences. HashiCorp continues to grow its HUG community through online events like HashiTalks and offline events like meetups and conferences.

Vault 1.1 Beta is now available and includes several enhancements such as client-side caching of responses containing newly created tokens and responses containing leased secrets generated off of these newly created tokens, as well as a new guide for monitoring Vault replication status in Enterprise clusters with Performance Replication and/or Disaster Recovery Replication enabled. The auto-unseal feature has also been demonstrated using Azure Key Vault, while a new interactive tutorial on Direct App Integration with Consul Template 0.20.0 is available. Additionally, the Kubernetes authentication method against Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster has been updated for testing purposes.

HashiCorp offers a Diversity Scholarship for the second year, providing financial assistance to individuals from underrepresented groups in tech and open source communities. The scholarship is available for attendees of HashiConf EU and US events, with deadlines set for March 22nd and April 9th respectively. Applicants will be selected based on their need, fit with the conference content, and potential impact on the community. A diverse review committee consisting of HashiCorp employees will make the selection process.

Notifications for run events in Terraform Enterprise are now available, allowing users to configure their workspaces to receive messages as their runs progress. This feature enables users to select specific events they want to be notified about and process them accordingly. With the introduction of Notifications, users can now keep up with the progress of their infrastructure provisioning runs without having to watch the run in the UI or poll the TFE API. The feature also supports integration with Slack for real-time updates on run progress.