June 2019 Summaries

HashiCorp is hosting its first full multi-day, multi-track event in Europe, HashiConf EU, which will bring together staff and partners to share knowledge on infrastructure automation tools such as Terraform, Vault, Consul, and Nomad. The event offers a range of training sessions, including hands-on courses that cover the most up-to-date syntax for each tool, with expert instructors and teaching assistants available to answer questions. Several courses have already sold out, but there are still seats available in some sessions, including Terraform 101, Vault 102, Consul 101, and Nomad 101, which provide comprehensive training on these industry-standard tools.

HashiCorp Vault is a solution that helps bridge the gap between security in traditional IT environments and cloud-based AWS environments. It enables secure access to resources and sensitive information by using identity to restrict and safeguard access, rather than relying on IP addresses or static perimeters. The system provides solutions for Centralized Secrets Management and Encryption as a Service, addressing two key challenges in this shift. Specifically, it offers dynamic secrets management through an AWS secrets engine, automated authentication methods via EC2/IAM auth, and data encryption via the transit secrets engine. By providing these features, HashiCorp Vault helps enterprises solve security in AWS environments and is available for discussion at the AWS re:Inforce event.

Terraform Cloud offers an easy way to set up remote state management, allowing teams to store and manage their Terraform state files in the cloud. This eliminates the need for complicated setup and provides features such as automatic locking of states, audit logs, and a fully featured state viewer. With Terraform Cloud, users can sign up for a free account, create an organization or join one, generate a token, configure their backend, and run `terraform init` to start using remote state management. The service also includes manual locking capabilities, allowing users to lock and unlock states directly in the UI, and provides versions of Terraform state files, making it easier for teams to collaborate on infrastructure as code projects.

Hashicorp Nomad 0.9.2 has been released, addressing a privilege escalation vulnerability in previous versions and introducing several new features such as alloc exec, restart, stop, and signal commands for running tasks, canary auto-promotion, preemption capabilities for service and batch jobs, and improvements to the Web UI and system scheduler. This release also includes bug fixes and enhancements to various Nomad components, and is available now for users. The new features in Nomad 0.9.2 aim to enhance debuggability, allocation lifecycle management, and deployment enhancements, while also providing preemption capabilities for service and batch jobs, and improving the overall user experience with features like UI search and visibility of preemption status.

Terraform 0.12 introduces improvements to its configuration language, allowing for additional templating of Kubernetes resources. This version enables the use of first-class expressions, such as `var.namespace`, without variable interpolation syntax, reducing duplication in configuration and enabling easier deployment of Kubernetes services like ExternalDNS and Fluentd daemonset. Additionally, Terraform can now be used with Helm to deploy charts and run tests, streamlining the deployment process for applications packaged with Helm. By leveraging these improvements and providers, users can seamlessly pass attributes from infrastructure resources into Kubernetes clusters, minimizing additional automation and enhancing their development workflow.

HashiCorp is sponsoring DevOps Barcelona, a community-organized conference featuring Nic Jackson as a speaker who will give two talks: Managing Failure in a Distributed World and Securing Cloud Native Communication, From End User to ServiceKey. Nic's talk on managing failure will cover areas of complexity in systems and patterns for adopting distributed architectures, while his second talk will focus on securing cloud native communication, including the importance of observability, reliability, and security. The conference also features a HashiCorp User Group Meetup with several HashiCorp engineers and community team members attending, providing an opportunity to connect with them.

HashiCorp has launched the HashiCorp Community Portal, a single source for its community to learn, share, and discuss HashiCorp products. The portal includes a new discussion forum, video content, product guides, local in-person events, and more. This move aims to provide a unified community space where individuals can engage with each other in different ways at different moments. The company is also shutting down its Gitter channels and redirecting the inbound communication to the forum, as it found that real-time chat introduced unhealthy expectations and demands on many people. The new discussion forums will be staffed with HashiCorp employees and provide a better long-form way to answer questions and link to historical solutions.