September 2019 Summaries

HashiCorp is participating in Cloud Field Day 6 on September 25, presenting an hour-long session focused on HashiCorp Consul. The event provides a technical in-depth focus and honest communication style, where industry professionals can ask questions and provide feedback about the tool. During the session, HashiCorp co-founder and CTO Mitchell Hashimoto will give an overview of Consul's newest capabilities, highlighting its service discovery and service mesh features. The presentation aims to simplify networking challenges in and across clouds, with a live-stream available for those who cannot attend in-person. Additional resources, including blog posts, learn tracks, and community forums, are also provided for those interested in learning more about Consul.

Nomad 0.10 introduces native Consul Connect integration, enabling services managed by Nomad to opt into mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) connections between services without requiring additional code changes. This integration uses features in Nomad to enable end-to-end mTLS through Consul Connect, providing network-level isolation and security benefits for microservices deployed in a cloud-native environment. With this integration, applications can use sidecar proxies to establish TLS connections automatically, while users can configure network stanzas at the task group level to support secure communication between services.

The Consul Team has partnered with VMware to support the Service Mesh Federation Specification, enabling secure communication between different service mesh solutions. This specification defines a common standard for service mesh federation, allowing services running in separate meshes to communicate as if they were running in the same mesh. Consul Enterprise implements the Service Mesh Federation Spec via its new federation service, which communicates with NSX-SM's federation service to keep service lists in sync. With service synchronization achieved, Consul services can now talk to remote services as if they were running in the same cluster, using TLS encryption under the hood. This enables flexibility and interoperability between different mesh deployments, allowing traffic to flow securely beyond individual mesh boundaries.

Terraform Cloud, the latest release from HashiCorp, offers free platform for users to collaborate on Terraform configurations through remotely stored, versioned, and shared state files. This new product bridges the gap between Terraform Open Source and Terraform Enterprise, providing a powerful workflow for teams and businesses that fit in between. It includes features such as automation and collaboration tools, including VCS connection, remote plans and applies, notifications/webhooks, full HTTP API, state management, collaborative runs, private module registry, and more. Terraform Cloud is free to use for teams of up to 5 users and offers paid upgrades, including Team and Governance, which provide additional features such as role-based access control, policy enforcement, and cost estimation. The new product aims to streamline infrastructure provisioning with a simple human-readable configuration language called HCL, VCS connection, and automatic plan runs upon changes to configuration files.

HashiCorp has announced the launch of HashiCorp Consul Service (HCS) on Azure, a private beta version that enables Microsoft Azure customers to provision managed Consul clusters directly through the Azure Marketplace. This service lowers the barrier to entry for organizations to adopt Consul for service discovery or service mesh across various environments, while offloading operational burden to HashiCorp's SRE experts. HCS on Azure provides native identity and billing integrations, enabling seamless adoption of Consul without additional administrative complexity. The service enables features like dynamic traffic management, service segmentation, observability, and Mesh Gateway for secure traffic routing across Azure regions, private data centers, and runtime environments.

HashiCorp has released Cost Estimation for HashiCorp Terraform Cloud and HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise, providing organizations with insight into the cost implications of infrastructure changes before they are applied. This feature integrates with policy as code workflows via Sentinel to enable preventative cost-control policies to be automatically assessed against changes. Organizations can now view an estimate of changes in monthly cost from their cloud provider before applying any change, making it easier to identify simple mistakes in configuration that could have significant financial implications and collaborate with other business units to keep costs aligned with forecasts. The feature also expands on Sentinel's capability to enforce consistent financial governance is applied to infrastructure changes. Additionally, the Cost Estimation feature supports escalation workflows for expensive changes and applies strict cost controls and automated oversight.

HashiCorp Nomad 0.10 is now available in beta release, offering advanced networking and storage features that enhance support for stateful workloads and sidecar applications. The new features include Consul Connect for seamless deployments of sidecar applications, Network Namespaces for secure intra-task communication, Host Volumes for expanded support of stateful workloads, and a UI Allocation File Explorer for browsing the file system of an allocation in the Web UI. These updates aim to improve operability and debugging capabilities for users.

The HashiCorp User Group (HUG) program has experienced significant growth since its inception in 2015, expanding from approximately 350 members to over 25,000 globally, with a presence in 113 cities across 44 countries. The community-driven initiative aims to educate and support users of HashiCorp tools, fostering collaboration and innovation through meetups, talks, and conferences. With the help of dedicated local organizers, the HUG program continues to grow, diversify, and strengthen, reflecting HashiCorp's commitment to community and its role in advancing the industry.