June 2020 Summaries

HashiCorp has announced the launch of its Cloud Platform (HCP), a fully managed cloud offering designed to automate deployment of HashiCorp products on any cloud provider. The first service, HCP Consul, is now in private beta with support for AWS, and will be followed by HCP Vault. HCP aims to simplify cluster management and automated workflows, enabling faster deployment of critical workloads and reducing costs. Key features include push-button deployments, fully managed infrastructure, multi-cloud flexibility, and integration with identity providers like GitHub. HCP Consul on AWS enables secure service networking and service mesh for workloads across various AWS services, while also connecting AWS environments to other cloud environments and private data centers. The platform is designed to provide a unified workflow and single set of APIs to deploy any HashiCorp product on any cloud provider, with the goal of accelerating digital transformation and making multi-cloud objectives more practical for enterprises.

HashiCorp has announced the public beta availability of Terraform 0.13, a major release with several key improvements and new features, including enhanced module-centric workflows, a new required providers syntax, custom variable validation, and support for Terraform login, which simplifies collaboration using Terraform Cloud. The new version builds on the powerful language improvements made in the previous release, making it easier to discover and initialize community providers from the Registry and distinguish between official HashiCorp-supported providers and partner-supported ones.

HashiCorp has released the public beta of Nomad 0.12, a simple and flexible orchestrator to deploy and manage containers and non-containerized applications across on-premises and cloud environments at scale. The new release introduces a breakthrough Multi-Cluster Deployment feature, which enables complete and fully-supported federation capabilities for production, making it the first and only orchestrator with this capability. This beta also includes over 15 new features that focus on application deployment flexibility and operator maintainability at scale, such as Spread Scheduling, Container Network Interface (CNI), and Multi-Interface Networking. The release is now available for download and includes various improvements and enhancements to the user interface, including a global search box, job scaling, and preemption. To experiment with these new features, users can register for an upcoming live demo session at HashiConf Digital, where they will have the opportunity to see the capabilities in action.

Terminating gateways are a new feature in HashiCorp Consul 1.8 that enable applications in a service mesh to securely communicate with external services outside the mesh environment, providing a consistent network and security model. They act as egress proxies, creating a single listener within the mesh that can accept connections for multiple destination services, and leveraging identities of source and target destination services to enforce Consul's access policies and intentions. By using TLS for identity and encryption, and Intentions for authorization, terminating gateways provide a common workflow for managing authentication and authorization across both internal and external services.

Bowery Farming has adopted HashiCorp Nomad to automate and standardize its application deployment workflow. The company's data team struggled with inconsistent deployments, long lead times, and expensive cloud bills due to the complexity of deploying applications across their hybrid infrastructure. By adopting Nomad, Bowery was able to deploy a single cluster across their distributed infrastructures, reducing management and resource overhead. This enabled fast time-to-value, increased deployment velocity, improved operational efficiency, and reduced hardware costs. With Nomad, Bowery can now effortlessly deploy applications in hybrid and edge environments, with one SRE managing the entire platform in part-time.

In the latest version of Consul, a service mesh technology, ingress gateways have been introduced, providing an easy and secure way for external services to communicate with services inside the Consul service mesh. This feature allows operators to quickly transition services to the Consul service mesh without requiring explicit networking overrides or additional service capacity. Ingress gateways can be configured to present a Consul-generated TLS certificate, enforce security through intentions, and apply Layer 7 traffic policies such as splitting, routing, or host-based paths. The feature is also compatible with Kubernetes, allowing users to leverage Helm to natively deploy ingress gateways onto their cluster, making it easier for practitioners to manage application lifecycles.

HashiCorp Vault Enterprise has successfully completed product compatibility validations with VMware vSphere and NetApp ONTAP, making it a flexible and cost-effective solution for securing and encrypting storage systems. The Key Management Interoperability Protocol (KMIP) standard allows Vault to integrate with over 100 common enterprise platforms, enabling organizations to protect sensitive data from leakage and comply with regulations such as PCI DSS, GDPR, and HIPAA. With the introduction of the KMIP secrets engine in Vault Enterprise v1.2, organizations can adopt Vault as a KMIP server for clients that retrieve cryptographic keys via the KMIP protocol, allowing them to continue using existing systems instead of adopting new APIs. This enables seamless integration with VMware and NetApp storage solutions, providing a scalable and automated solution for managing encryption keys.

The Transform secrets engine allows Vault to encode and decode sensitive values residing in external systems such as databases or file systems, ensuring that even if the data is leaked, the encoded secrets remain uncompromised. The engine can encrypt data while preserving formatting or partially encrypt data based on a user-configurable formula, simplifying the process of managing sensitive information. To use the Transform engine, roles, transformations, templates, and alphabets need to be configured. Roles define the set of transformations allowed, transformations hold information about a particular transformation, templates determine what data is encrypted, and alphabets provide the custom character set used in the resulting ciphertext. The engine can be integrated into an application using Vault's API, allowing for secure encoding and decoding of sensitive data without managing the configuration itself.

HashiCorp is hosting HashiConf Digital, a fully digital community conference, from June 22-24, 2020. The event features product updates, keynotes, technical sessions, workshops, and community connections delivered through a new digital platform. The program includes dozens of advanced technical sessions presented by experts, as well as Q&A sessions, live chat, panel discussions, and scheduled meet-ups. On-demand educational videos and live replays will be available for those who cannot attend in real-time or need to catch up later. With this transformation to a digital format, the event has become more accessible to the HashiCorp community, with an expected 8,000 attendees from over 60 countries. Registration is now open, allowing participants to join in on the discussions and connections.

The HashiCorp team has released the first version of their Visual Studio Code (VS Code) extension for Terraform, which includes support for the Terraform Language Server and syntax highlighting for Terraform 0.12. The Language Server provides code completion functionality for data source, resource, and attribute information, leveraging existing packages and features in a binary that can be reused by multiple editors. The extension is one of the most popular editor extensions for Terraform, with over 600,000 installs from the Visual Studio Marketplace. This release marks the beginning of HashiCorp's support for VS Code and editor integrations, with a dedicated team and roadmap focused on both the extension and language server.