March 2020 Summaries

HashiCorp has joined the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF), a move that aims to strengthen its presence in the cloud native computing ecosystem, improve product integrations with CNCF projects, and work more closely with the community of cloud engineers. The company plans to increase its participation at CNCF events, expand its technical support, and provide seamless integrations with popular projects such as Kubernetes, Envoy, and Prometheus. HashiCorp aims to make Kubernetes a first-class experience across all its products and collaborate on making other CNCF projects more accessible, offering a variety of options for leveraging secrets management tools like Vault in cloud native environments. The company also plans to engage more closely with the community through GitHub, Discuss forums, and other events to gather feedback and improve its products and processes.

Nomad 0.11 introduces support for the Container Storage Interface (CSI), allowing users to manage external storage volumes for stateful workloads. CSI is an industry standard that enables storage vendors to develop plugins once, which can be used across multiple container orchestration systems. With Nomad's integration, users can launch jobs that claim storage volumes from various cloud providers, such as AWS EBS and GCP persistent disks, without needing to write custom orchestration code. The CSI plugin architecture allows for dynamic management of plugins, enabling users to register volumes with the new `nomad volume register` command and use them in job configurations. Nomad's integration is currently in beta, but it provides a significant improvement in managing external storage volumes, making it easier for operators to deploy stateful workloads.

This Terraform configuration is being broken down into smaller, more manageable pieces called modules. These modules can be reused across multiple environments and teams, improving testing, reusability, and scalability. By structuring the configuration in this way, team members can collaborate on different aspects of the infrastructure without duplicating effort or compromising consistency. The use of Terraform modules also enables the standardization and reuse of infrastructure components across multiple environments, which is essential for maintaining a consistent architecture. Furthermore, separating configurations for different environments into distinct folders allows for state isolation between environments and granular control over configuration as needed. Additionally, sharing modules through the Terraform Registry or Terraform Cloud Private Module Registry facilitates collaboration and versioning among teams, ensuring that changes are communicated before consuming updated modules. By adopting this approach, teams can achieve a more efficient and maintainable infrastructure setup.

The HashiCorp team has announced a Technical Preview of the Nomad Autoscaler, an open-source project that provides automatic scaling capabilities for workloads running on a Nomad cluster. The autoscaler can be easily deployed on Nomad and employs a plugin system to allow operators to customize its behavior. It is designed to address the need for automatic scaling in response to real-time demands, balancing resource utilization with necessary costs and scheduling contention. The autoscaler has been implemented as an external process interacting with a new Scaling Policy API in Nomad, providing multiple plugin systems for customizing its operation. Operators can run the autoscaler on Nomad, configure job specifications with autoscaling policies, and use observability tools to monitor scaling events. The feature is currently available as a tech preview, gathering feedback from the community before being officially released and supported by HashiCorp.

Terraform has announced the addition of Terraform Login to its CLI, a new command that simplifies connection to Terraform Cloud by guiding users through obtaining a user token and configuring their CLI. Terraform Login will connect the remote backend to Terraform Cloud by default, or can be used to connect to Terraform Enterprise with the specified hostname. The feature is part of Terraform's efforts to strengthen and streamline workflows across its tools. Users can try out Terraform Login in the community forum for questions and suggestions.

HashiCorp has released the beta version of Nomad 0.11, a workload orchestrator that enables organizations to deploy and manage containers and non-containerized applications at scale. The new release introduces several features, including extensible, pluggable storage volumes, autoscaling, task dependencies, remote exec, and audit logging for enterprise customers. These features aim to enhance Nomad's core orchestration capabilities and provide better scalability, visibility, and compliance. The release includes a tech preview of autoscaling, which allows users to dynamically scale application instances based on real-time load or business SLAs.

HashiCorp is committed to growing its open source community and making it accessible to everyone through knowledge sharing, kindness, and mentorship. The strength of a project lies in the community and ecosystem surrounding it, not just the quality of the code. HashiCorp is seeking nominations for community Ambassadors who have made significant contributions to the community by sharing their knowledge and engaging with others. The nominations should include specific examples of how these individuals engaged within the community and can be submitted by April 5th.

To help developers automate their workflows and improve efficiency, CircleCI has published a new tutorial that integrates infrastructure as code using Terraform into its continuous integration platform. The guide allows users to deploy new infrastructure alongside software releases, making it easier for development teams to manage their underlying systems. By combining CI/CD automation with Terraform, users can create repeatable infrastructure deployment pipelines and automate the process of deploying applications. This tutorial is designed for developers and sysadmins who want to use their skills to deploy infrastructure as code, resulting in a working application to test.

The HashiCorp Terraform Operator for Kubernetes enables users to define and create infrastructure as code natively in Kubernetes, leveraging Terraform Cloud's control plane for proper handling and locking of state, sequential execution of runs, and established patterns for injecting secrets and provisioning resources. The Operator allows users to deploy a message queue that an application needs before it is deployed to Kubernetes, automating tasks to manage a set of services. It also enables the creation of custom resources internal and external to the Kubernetes cluster, capturing and automating tasks to manage a set of services. The Operator requires an account in Terraform Cloud with a free or paid Terraform Cloud organization, and uses a Team API Token for authentication. The Operator can be deployed using Helm and must be configured with sensitive variables stored as Kubernetes secrets. Once deployed, users can create a Workspace custom resource, which builds a Terraform Cloud workspace, executes a run, and updates the workspace status in Kubernetes. The Operator can also be used to update existing workspaces by applying changes to inline, non-sensitive variables and module source and version. Additionally, the Operator provides a way to delete workspaces and maintain a history of runs and the current state.

The Terraform Consul provider allows users to interact with Consul resources, enabling tasks such as registering external services, referencing Consul keys in Terraform configurations, and referencing a list of agents. A new guide is available that demonstrates how to register two external services using Terraform, while another guide explains how to use AppDynamics CNS to monitor Consul and collect telemetry data.

HashiCorp has released HashiCorp Consul Service (HCS) on Azure, which provides a "secure by default" configuration for deploying Consul in public cloud environments. This service enables features such as service discovery, secure communication across services with Consul Service Mesh, and dynamic updates to service configurations using familiar tools like Consul-Template. To get started, practitioners can review the HCS on Azure learn guides or proceed directly to the Azure Marketplace, where they can request the HCS environment and join an existing Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) cluster to it. The service allows for deploying a Kubernetes-native application onto AKS and configuring a zero-trust security policy around the Kubernetes services using Consul's service mesh capabilities.

HashiCorp has announced that all sessions from its February HashiTalks event are now available to watch, along with some additional talks. The event saw significant growth, including more talk submissions and attendees, and was successful in supporting community engagement and speaker enablement. A wide range of topics were covered, including Terraform, Nomad, Consul, Vault, and various use cases for these tools. Speakers also shared their expertise on best practices, security, and compliance, as well as hands-on sessions and case studies. HashiCorp plans to continue hosting annual global HashiTalks events, as well as smaller regional ones, and invites attendees to join in person or online for future community events and conferences.

Terraform modules are a key part of writing maintainable and shareable Terraform configurations, recommended by HashiCorp for almost any configuration. Modules allow organizations to ensure consistent use of security features and best practices, and can be used to organize, encapsulate, and re-use configuration. The Terraform Registry hosts hundreds of modules contributed by the community, which can be used to enhance Terraform configurations. As complex configurations become more intricate, modules can simplify them, and they can also be shared within organizations or with the community.

The next generation of Sentinel imports for Terraform Cloud is almost here, offering a completely re-designed import API to better reflect Terraform 0.12's updated data model, addressing several shortcomings in the existing Terraform 0.11 API and the 0.12 shim. The new imports aim to simplify resource discovery with filter, address long-standing issues with diff data, state attributes, and module traversal. The new format is more expressive than the pre-0.12 diff data format, making it easier to filter out specific kinds of changes and identify certain operations. Additionally, users can now access raw JSON plan data under the `raw` key in `tfplan/v2`. The imports are currently in technology preview and may be subject to change, but they will eventually become the default import.