January 2020 Summaries

The HashiCorp Terraform Registry is being updated to include all Terraform providers, both maintained by HashiCorp and community providers, allowing for automatic download and installation of providers published in the Registry. The configuration language is also getting an update to support this change, with new syntax that allows authors to host and publish providers to the Registry from their own GitHub repositories. This change aims to simplify provider use, offering streamlined access to partner and community providers while providing clear links to ownership. Terraform will continue to automatically download HashiCorp's providers, but users can now declare a registry source for any provider, enabling simplified installation of providers not listed in the public registry.

Terraform provides a simple way to define and manage infrastructure as code, which has helped many practitioners improve repeatability, reduce failures, and increase provisioning speed. This process typically involves storing infrastructure as code configuration files in a Version Control System repository and using Terraform to create resources based on them. Terraform Cloud can integrate directly with popular VCS providers such as GitHub, GitLab, Atlassian BitBucket, and Azure DevOps, allowing practitioners to store and manage their code directly in the VCS of their choice while bringing automated functionality to their process. This integration enables practitioners to link their Terraform Cloud workspace to a VCS repository, which notifies Terraform Cloud of any commits, pull requests, and merges, and automatically produces speculative plans that present as integrated checks, allowing practitioners to see exactly what will happen if they merge the request without risking their existing infrastructure.

HashiCorp is pleased to offer a scholarship program for its US-based HashiConf conference, which will take place in San Diego, California on October 13-15. The company aims to create an inclusive community and provide financial support to members who may not be able to attend due to financial constraints. To apply for the scholarship, applicants must demonstrate need, potential value to the community, and a likelihood of making a positive impact. A diverse group of HashiCorp employees will review applications, with personal information kept confidential throughout the process. The deadline to apply is February 28th, and interested individuals can reach out to `[email protected]` for more information.

The concept of infrastructure as code (IaC) has gained significant traction in recent years, particularly with the use of tools like HashiCorp Terraform. IaC involves defining and managing infrastructure through code, rather than manually configuring it. This approach simplifies code testing, provides repeatability, and enables teams to reuse components across different projects. IaC can be applied throughout the infrastructure lifecycle, from initial build to ongoing updates and changes, making it easier to provision and apply configurations, understand intent, and manage reliability, manageability, and scalability. By adopting IaC tools like Terraform, organizations can mitigate risks associated with poor management decisions, reduce inconsistencies, and ensure consistency and repeatability in infrastructure deployment.

HashiCorp Consul has been re-launched on AWS with a new Quick Start Guide that incorporates the latest features and best practices for security and high availability. The guide supports ACM Private CA for Load Balancers, enabling secure traffic to VPCs through Classic Load Balancers. Consul's Autopilot feature automates server management, introducing new servers as needed while monitoring cluster state and cleaning up unused ones. Additionally, the Consul Connect Service Mesh has been enabled by default in the guide, allowing users to start using its capabilities immediately. The updated guide is designed to help users get started with Consul or deploy it into their existing environment, ensuring they are aware of the latest features offered by Consul.

The HashiCorp Terraform team has announced the launch of the new Terraform Registry, which expands to include Terraform providers in addition to modules. The registry allows users to find and share modules and providers for various infrastructure services, making it easier to reuse infrastructure as code. The first set of providers available on the registry are those maintained by HashiCorp, with plans to add providers from partners and community members in the future. The new registry aims to simplify the process of finding and sharing infrastructure components, enabling users to easily search for modules and providers alongside documentation and reference information.

Vagrant 2.2.6 introduces two new features, Dependency Provisioners and Box Checksum Validation. Dependency Provisioners allow users to control when their provisioners run for a given guest by giving them before or after options that refer to Root Provisioners. This feature is experimental and requires enabling the VAGRANT_EXPERIMENTAL environment variable. The new feature provides finer-grained control over the run order of provisioners, allowing users to specify if a provisioner should run more than once. Box Checksum Validation allows Vagrant to automatically validate that the downloaded box matches the checksum before unpacking, with support for SHA256, SHA384, and SHA512 added in this release.

Jan 13 2020Kaitlin CarterThe Consul Education team has created new guides to help developers secure and monitor Consul service registrations, focusing on securing service-to-service communication and ensuring services are registered with Consul as healthy.` Consul Connect secures service-to-service communication by allowing the use of proxies, which provides a zero-trust network for deploying demo applications. The guides provide step-by-step instructions on how to register services and their proxies, as well as using health checks with Consul. The focus is on ensuring that Consul DNS only returns healthy services, testing the health of the agent and deployed services.

We've built a distributed collaboration approach by holding regular critique sessions twice a week, where designers present their work and receive feedback from the team. This helps to ensure that designs meet their objectives, remove blockers, empower each other, hear new perspectives, and build domain expertise. To make it effective, we use guidelines such as timeboxing, keeping it abstract, having a facilitator, asking exploratory questions, reinforcing good design choices, preparing and being present, running critiques regularly, and using a specific platform like Whimsical to facilitate the process. This approach has been valuable in our remote setting, allowing us to provide feedback and receive feedback in a structured way, which helps to maintain context and ensure that everyone is on the same page.

Tracing .NET Applications with Consul's Service Mesh allows developers to bridge the gap between workloads and enable distributed tracing for applications running .NET or .NET Core frameworks. This enables enriched traces with service metadata such as IP addresses or versions without declaring annotations within application code. By leveraging a set of ASP.NET Core services, tracing is implemented using proxies to pass tracing metadata and record requests. Tracing libraries such as zipkin4net are used for the Zipkin tracing system or OpenTracing specification for Jaeger tracing system. Consul's service mesh capability can be used to control traffic between legacy and greenfield .NET applications by deploying a proxy sidecar with each service, automatically registering services into Consul. This enables developers to shape traffic and troubleshoot requests between different versions of their services using distributed tracing. Additionally, Consul supports Envoy 1.11.1 which must use the Zipkin span format, and uses a service-splitter configuration file to divert traffic between two subsets of expense, namely version 1 and version 2. By applying a service-splitter, developers can control how much traffic they send to a new version of a service, ensuring its production readiness through gradual canary releases or A/B testing based on HTTP headers.

Terraform Cloud now offers a complete set of paid offerings with self-selection features and plans, allowing users to upgrade to Team or Governance plans, which provide additional capabilities for managing teams and enforcing Sentinel policies. The paid features are applied at the organization level and can be cancelled at any time. Users who opted into the limited-time preview of paid features must upgrade by January 15th, 2020, to maintain uninterrupted access to those features.

Consul Connect provides a service-to-service connection authorization and encryption mechanism through mutual Transport Layer Security (mTLS) for secure mesh networks. To use these networks, ingress points like NGINX or HAProxy are required to act as gateways for external traffic to communicate with internal services. These proxies can be configured using consul-template to work as native ingress proxies, providing flexibility when performance is crucial. The example setup demonstrates how to create a robust ingress proxy using Consul Connect and popular 3rd-party proxies like NGINX or HAProxy.