December 2019 Summaries

HashiCorp has had an exciting year, marked by significant milestones across its product portfolio, including major updates to Consul, Terraform, and Nomad. The company has also seen rapid growth of its open-source community, with thousands of new users attending conferences and participating in user groups. HashiCorp has expanded its commercial footprint, adding hundreds of new enterprise customers, and strengthened its partnerships with cloud providers like Microsoft and Google Cloud. The company has also grown its employee base from 350 to over 800 people and is investing heavily in security, hiring a Chief Security Officer to build out a world-class security team. HashiCorp was named #4 on the Forbes Cloud 100 list, recognizing its progress as an infrastructure company. As the company looks ahead to 2020, it's excited to see the energy around its community and products, and is looking forward to achieving great things in the year to come.

HashiCorp's Terraform has partnered with Cisco to deliver a new provider for the Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI). This integrated solution supports over 90 resources and datasources, covering all aspects of bringing up and configuring ACI infrastructure across on-prem, WAN, access, and cloud. The combined solution optimizes network compliance, operations, and maintains consistent state across multi-cloud infrastructure, enabling customers to adopt automation and faster deployment of applications. Terraform's plugin-based extensibility enables seamless integration with Cisco ACI, allowing users to define network intent through a simple workflow. With the new provider, customers can now automate their network setup using Terraform, overcoming one of the key barriers to entry in network teams.

HashiCorp has announced a new Kubernetes integration that enables applications with no native HashiCorp Vault logic built-in to leverage static and dynamic secrets sourced from Vault. This is made possible by a new tool called vault-k8s, which leverages the Kubernetes Mutating Admission Webhook to intercept and augment specifically annotated pod configuration for secrets injection using Init and Sidecar containers. With this integration, applications only need to find a secret at a filesystem path, rather than managing tokens or connecting to an external API for direct interaction with Vault. The tool supports various use-cases such as pre-populating secrets before an application starts, keeping secrets fresh by periodically checking in a sidecar container, and using Kubernetes Service Accounts tied to a Vault Policy for fine-grained control of secret injection without compromising security. The integration also includes flexible output formatting options using the Vault Agent template functionality, which can be used to format secret data into desired formats such as database connection strings. To get started with vault-k8s, users can install the latest Vault Helm Chart, which supports the new feature, and apply specific annotations to their pod configuration to enable secrets injection. The integration is designed to expand Kubernetes support for HashiCorp Vault and provide a variety of options for securely introducing secrets into workflows.

HashiCorp Vault provides a secure way to manage and rotate database credentials in Kubernetes applications. The integration allows operators to provide dynamically generated credentials for applications, managing the lifecycle of credentials, rotating and revoking as required. The process involves creating roles, connections, and policies to control access to secrets, using metadata annotations to inject dynamically generated database secrets into a Kubernetes pod. The integration automatically handles authentication with Vault and manages the secrets, allowing the application to read the secrets from the filesystem.

Terraform Enterprise has introduced an updated event format for audit logs, which now includes the originating organization for all events. This change enables customers to build improved monitoring and alerting around their Terraform Enterprise audit logs by isolating and monitoring environments by organization. The new feature allows users to filter and prioritize events based on organization, providing a more standardized approach to monitoring and ensuring that sensitive systems receive timely intervention. With this enhancement, customers can now effectively manage their multi-organization configurations and take advantage of centralized logging services while maintaining the unique requirements of each environment.

HashiCorp created a design apprenticeship program to provide mentorship opportunities, increase efficiency, and offer a rare remote junior role. The program aims to promote diversity by hiring individuals from diverse backgrounds who may not have access to traditional internship or job opportunities. The apprenticeship is a full-time role with no end date, and the goal is to mentor the apprentice into a "Level 1" Product Designer within one year. The program includes regular check-ins, a documented career ladder, and specific milestones that lead toward the first level of the transparent career ladder.

As of December 12th, 2019, Terraform Enterprise and Cloud have introduced team visibility settings that provide an improved workflow for delegating ownership of workspaces and managing access for specific teams. Previously, a workspace admin could only view teams they were a member of, which was cumbersome and created security risks. The new feature allows workspace admins to see all visible teams and add them to a workspace without needing to be a team member. Team visibility can be changed by organization owners under the team's settings page, with options for secret or visible settings that determine who can view the team and its membership. This update aims to enhance collaboration and security in Terraform workflows.

HashiCorp has announced the ability for Terraform Cloud and Enterprise customers to retrieve data from multiple business systems via Business-aware Policies, allowing organizations to query information from other systems to determine if changes in infrastructure are compliant with company policy. This feature extends the Sentinel policy as code functionality to allow policies to retrieve data from external APIs using HTTP/S. With this new feature, organizations can now check the current weather forecast or verify that other departments have approved a change in ServiceNow. The announcement also includes several examples of how customers can use Business-aware Policies, including confirming deployment windows, restricting allowed sets, authenticating requests, and configuring parameters. Additionally, HashiCorp has demonstrated creative uses for this feature, such as querying the NASA API to retrieve a list of Near Earth Objects. This new functionality opens up a wide range of possibilities for customers using Sentinel, enabling them to automate compliance checks and have confidence that changes are approved by the right teams.

Consul 1.7.0 is now available for beta testing, offering improved networking capabilities and enhanced security features through namespaces, GCP Snapshot Storage, and AWS PCA as a Certificate Authority for Consul. Namespaces enable teams to manage resources independently, while GCP Snapshot Storage allows for cloud-based storage of Consul snapshots, and AWS PCA simplifies certificate management. These new features aim to reduce operational challenges and increase efficiency in large-scale environments.

The HashiCorp Consul is a services networking platform that automates cloud networking using a shared service registry, allowing both practitioners and enterprises to connect and secure application services across multiple runtime platforms and cloud environments. The new release of Consul 1.7 introduces namespaces, which simplify organizational complexity by enabling self-service, governance, and operations across many user environments and services. Namespaces allow global operators to create isolated environments and apply service access restrictions for authenticated users, removing the need for teams to coordinate resource names between them.

The HashiCorp Scholarship Program aims to support members of the technical community who lack financial sponsorship or means to attend HashiDays Sydney and HashiConf EU. The program values diversity and inclusivity, with a focus on applicants who can make a positive impact on the HashiCorp community by attending. Applications will be considered based on need, value, and potential impact, with specific considerations for travel logistics in each region. The selection process is confidential, and applications must be submitted by January 10th, 2020, for consideration.

You can now invite new users to your organization by sending them an email from within the web UI, and view a list of all users that are part of an organization along with which teams they belong to in a single, unified view. You can also search for users in your organization by email address or username. To invite a user, navigate to the organization settings, Users page, click on "Invite a user", enter their email address and select the team(s) you would like them to join. The invitation workflow is consistent for all users, regardless of whether they have Terraform Cloud accounts already or are new and must create accounts. You can manage multiple organizations and easily search for specific users or remove them from your organization. The new features are available in the Free Tier of Terraform Cloud and require upgrading to the Team tier for creating additional teams.

The HashiCorp community has grown significantly since the first HashiConf conference in 2015, with nearly 30,000 members globally. The conferences have expanded to include more tracks and hands-on product trainings, and will now take place on three different continents in 2020, including for the first time in the Asia-Pacific region with HashiDays Sydney. The goal of these events remains steadfast: to support the global community using HashiCorp tools to solve development, operations, and security challenges in infrastructure.

HashiCorp is collaborating with AWS to provide support for various AWS services through its Terraform product, including Amazon VPC Ingress Routing, Managed Node Groups for Amazon EKS, and Fargate profiles. These enhancements enable users to simplify the integration of network and security appliances within their network topology and automate management of Kubernetes worker nodes. Additionally, Terraform now supports expected concurrency on AWS Lambda functions and aliases, allowing users to configure the expected concurrency of their Lambda functions without experiencing burst throttles or cold starts.

The HashiCorp Store has launched, offering an initial selection of merchandise including a hoodie, t-shirt, and mug. The items are made from eco-friendly materials such as organic and recycled polyester blends and 100% cotton. The store is currently available only in the US and will periodically release more unique merchandise. The launch comes after HashiCorp's State of Cloud Strategy survey found that 86% of respondents rely on cloud platform teams for various reasons, highlighting the importance of these teams in achieving goals.

HashiCorp and AWS have a long-standing partnership, with HashiCorp announcing launch-day support for several new AWS services at re:Invent. HashiCorp will be showcasing its products and expertise at the conference, including Terraform, Vault, Consul, and Packer, which integrate seamlessly with AWS services to facilitate application deployments and infrastructure in the cloud. The company's Co-founder and CTO Mitchell Hashimoto will join the AWS team for a Twitch.tv livestream on December 3rd, discussing all things HashiCorp, including a quick overview of Consul. Additionally, HashiCorp will be hosting breakout sessions, floor presentations, and partner booths to discuss how its products can help enterprises manage heterogeneous environments and achieve best practices for managing infrastructure as code using AWS services.