August 2019 Summaries

Sentinel is a tool for preventing mistakes and placing guardrails around operations in your organization. Without Sentinel, operators are responsible for ensuring their resource configurations adhere to the organization's standards, which can be time-consuming and prone to errors. With Sentinel in Terraform Cloud, operators will not be allowed to create resources that deviate from the defined parameters of their organization's Sentinel policy, making it easier to enforce best practices and prevent mistakes. The new Sentinel Getting Started track on HashiCorp Learn provides hands-on guides for implementing Policy-As-Code in organizations, covering topics such as policy vocabulary, building policies, and using the Terraform Sentinel Provider. Additionally, the Governance team has introduced VCS integrated Policy Sets, allowing organizations to manage policies in repositories and instantly enforce them across multiple workspaces, making policy management even easier. The HashiCorp Learn platform offers a comprehensive learning experience for users to get started with Sentinel and take their organization's infrastructure management to the next level.

HashiCorp is announcing multiple features that integrate HashiCorp Vault with Kubernetes, aiming to provide users with various options for securely introducing secrets into their application stack. The initial roadmap focuses on features allowing users with limited knowledge to leverage Vault and Kubernetes for secret management. This includes injecting secrets into pods via a sidecar, using Helm charts, and exploring the use case of integrating Vault with the Kubernetes Secrets mechanism via a syncer process. The company is seeking feedback from the community on these feature ideas to improve their integrations and make key features production-ready.

The Consul Team has announced the general availability of Consul 1.6.0, a multi-cloud service networking platform that enables connecting and securing services across various runtime platforms and public or private clouds. The release introduces several major new features for Consul Connect, including L7 traffic management with advanced configuration entry types, mesh gateways, and intention & CA replication, which enable increased reliability and deployment patterns such as HTTP path-based routing and traffic shifting. This update is the result of community feedback and improvements made during the pre-release period, and it includes a number of bug fixes and removals of deprecated features. The release binaries can be downloaded, and a live demo of new features can be watched via a webinar.

The Consul Team has published a blog post on how to perform Canary deployments using traffic splitting and resolution. The deployment involves creating a demo environment with three services: a public web service, two versions of the API service, and a Consul server. The goal is to gradually increase traffic to the new version of the API service while monitoring its behavior. The process involves configuring traffic splitting, starting and registering the new API service version 2, increasing traffic to it, and finally sending all traffic to the new version. The deployment demonstrates how Consul's advanced L7 traffic management features enable sophisticated traffic routing and service failover. The post provides a step-by-step guide on how to perform Canary deployments using traffic splitting and resolution in Consul 1.6.0.

Vault 1.2 has been released, introducing several new feature guides on HashiCorp Learn to help users understand its enhancements, including Database Static Roles and Credential Rotation, KMIP Secrets Engine, and Vault HA Cluster with Integrated Storage.

The HashiCorp Vault team has released an official Helm Chart for Vault, allowing users to easily deploy and manage Vault clusters on Kubernetes. The Helm chart supports three modes: Single Server, Highly-Available (HA), and Dev mode, providing a repeatable deployment process and reducing complexity. It enables running Vault directly on Kubernetes, leveraging native integrations and other tools built for the platform. The chart is designed to simplify the setup of future roadmapped features and provides a foundation for secure secret management, encryption as a service, and audit logging. Users can install the chart using Helm, initialize and unseal the vault instance, and access its features through Kubernetes pods.

HashiConf EU 2019 was a three-day, two-track European conference that took place in Amsterdam at the beginning of August 2019, with nearly 800 attendees, double the number from the previous year. The conference featured training, talks, and major product announcements, including Consul 1.6, Nomad 0.10, Terraform 0.12, and Vault 1.2 updates. The event was built around content, with more talks submitted during the call for papers than ever before, and included keynotes from HashiCorp executives, as well as industry experts and company representatives. The conference also featured a keynote hall expansion and served over 2,100 espresso drinks during the three days. The videos of the keynotes and breakout sessions are now available on-demand, including edited transcripts.