August 2020 Summaries

Terraform provisions infrastructure using a declarative configuration language, allowing users to define multiple instances of infrastructure with a single block of code. The `count` feature allows provisioning resources in flexible scaling scenarios, while the `for_each` feature enables provisioning entire modules or duplicate resources with complex configurations. These features work together to simplify Terraform's declarative configuration language and provide users with more flexibility in their infrastructure setup. With the recent release of Terraform 0.13, these features can also be used with modules and other new features.

HashiCorp's Vault has helped Sky Betting & Gaming (SBG), a U.K.-based betting and gaming company, mitigate the risk of user error by implementing various features such as backup capabilities and granular permission management. Despite encountering an issue where a deleted secret was restored incorrectly, SBG used creative workarounds with other HashiCorp tools to restore Vault without causing downtime or maintenance. The team documented each step to create best practices for future reference, including using Vault's audit logs, KV Version 2, smaller secrets, and educating the team on Vault usage. By implementing these measures, companies can minimize the impact of user errors and ensure business-critical applications remain stable.

HashiCorp is pleased to announce that its Terraform Cloud ServiceNow app is now generally available for enterprise customers. The new application allows IT users to deploy any application on any infrastructure using a familiar ServiceNow self-service interface, improving the visibility and manageability of the infrastructure provisioning lifecycle. Terraform Cloud provides everything practitioners, teams, and global businesses need to create and collaborate on infrastructure and manage risks for security, compliance, and operational constraints. The new app is built on the Flow Designer architecture and offers several actions, including provisioning resources, creating variables, polling run state, and deleting workspaces, making it easier to define and provision a datacenter infrastructure using ServiceNow's Service Catalog interface.

HashiCorp has expanded its shipping capabilities to service 35 new countries/territories, offering more options for customers worldwide. The company has also introduced three new merchandise items: a backpack, travel mug, and unisex socks. These items are available in various colors, including blue, off-white, and black, making them suitable for both business and casual attire. The new backpack is water-resistant and can carry laptops or tablets up to 15 inches, while the travel mug is insulated to maintain the temperature of hot or cold drinks. Customers can now shop from a wider range of locations and share their purchases on social media using specific hashtags and tagging @HashiCorpUsers on Twitter.

HashiCorp has released a new hands-on tutorial for Securing Consul and Registered Services on Kubernetes using the official Helm chart. The tutorial covers key aspects of setting up a secure Consul service mesh, including gossip encryption, TLS, and ACLs, as well as deploying example services and configuring zero-trust networking. Consul's integration with Kubernetes is simplified through the use of the official Helm Chart, enabling a low-touch security configuration process that extends scalability and simplicity.

HashiCorp, a sponsor at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Europe Virtual, has made its three deep dive presentations from the event available on YouTube via a playlist. The company's goal in joining the CNCF in March was to advance integrations with CNCF projects and work closely with the community of cloud engineers. HashiCorp's portfolio of products integrates with many CNCF projects, including Kubernetes, Spinnaker, Helm, CNI, Envoy, Prometheus, gRPC, Jaeger, and Open Tracing. The company has strengthened its product interaction with Kubernetes as a platform, particularly through its Vault and Terraform integrations. HashiCorp Consul is helping organizations on the journey to service mesh, while Nomad offers a simple and flexible orchestrator for deploying and managing containers across on-premises and cloud environments at scale.

HashiCorp Learn is a digital education platform that provides self-guided product education for practitioners, with over 340 hands-on resources available. The platform has seen significant growth, with over 125,000 practitioners using it to solve problems and build skills in cloud infrastructure. To improve the user experience, HashiCorp recently completed a redesign of the platform, which includes reorganizing content into more flexible collections and introducing new product landing pages. The new design provides better tools for navigation and content discovery, making it easier for users to find featured content and tutorials. The redesign was made possible through feedback from practitioners who participated in early prototypes, and HashiCorp is now seeking user input on future product research projects.

HashiCorp's Consul is being used by Criteo, an advertising platform, to manage networked services and bring more autonomy to service users. The company has created a custom UI, called the Consul TemplateRB, which shows live information about Consul displayed via a simple static web server, allowing users to discover, learn about, manage, and investigate their services without relying on DevOps for support. This enables users to find services by typing a few words, use tags to filter systems, directly call APIs, and search for data quickly, among other features. The Consul TemplateRB also provides the DevOps team with valuable insights into user behavior, allowing them to proactively address additional user challenges. Additionally, Criteo has implemented default queries to simplify search and discovery while improving load management, and uses Consul for automated load balancing, metrics, alerts, availability monitoring, and DNS configuration. By giving users a clear set of expectations around Consul and the SLA, the DevOps team can further reduce the number of questions coming into them and ensure users know exactly what is agreed upon.

HashiCorp has achieved SOC 2 Type I compliance for multiple products including Terraform Enterprise, Vault Enterprise, Consul Enterprise, Nomad Enterprise, and Terraform Cloud, demonstrating its commitment to customer trust and security. The company's security team collaborates with product and engineering teams to ensure products are designed with both security and customer data protection in mind. HashiCorp has implemented industry best practices for controls and processes, including security awareness training, internal threat models, external penetration testing, vulnerability management, and endpoint management. An external audit by a third-party against the AICPA Trust Service Principles validated HashiCorp's commitment to earning and maintaining customer trust, with plans to pursue SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 compliance in the future.

HashiCorp has announced the availability of a new Business tier for Terraform Cloud, which offers enterprise features such as Single Sign-On (SSO), self-hosted agents to manage private resources, and audit logging with Splunk integration. This new tier includes job concurrency capabilities that allow multiple jobs to be processed in parallel, reducing wait times for teams. Additionally, the Business tier comes with Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and flexible support options, including service level agreements and support options tailored to organizational needs. The new features are designed to meet the expanded needs of large enterprises operating in complex environments.

HashiCorp has released Terraform 0.13, the latest major version of their popular infrastructure-as-code tool, which builds on improvements made in the previous version, including enhanced module-specific workflows and a new provider source syntax that supports multiple registries and namespaced providers. This release also introduces terraform login for simple collaboration using Terraform Cloud, custom variable validation, and improved resource targeting and state push capabilities. The update includes many resources available for both new and existing users, such as documentation, tutorials, and upgrade guides. With this release, HashiCorp aims to solidify the Terraform ecosystem and empower collaborative workflows at organizations of all sizes.

HashiCorp has released a new interface for its Terraform Registry, designed to simplify the process of finding and staying up-to-date with providers in the vast ecosystem of integrations and contributors that make up Terraform. The registry now offers a powerful search option, tiers denoting the source of an integration, official badges indicating HashiCorp ownership or partnership verification, and community badges signifying open-source contributions. Publishing providers is also made easy through a self-service interface, with over 70 community maintainers already on board. With Terraform 0.13, all providers are now given a first-class experience as part of terraform init, and published providers can be automatically downloaded by Terraform without side loading. The registry aims to delight users and provider developers alike, making it easier for them to find the perfect modules and providers for their tasks at hand.

HashiCorp, a company known for its cloud infrastructure tools, has released a series of hands-on tutorials for its conferences, including Consul, Terraform, Vault, and Nomad. These tutorials are designed to be interactive and provide a step-by-step guide on how to use these tools in a production environment. The tutorials cover various topics such as secure applications with service sidecar proxies, enforcing zero-trust networks, managing secrets with Vault, running applications with Nomad, and more. The tutorials are available for free on the HashiCorp Learn platform and can be accessed at any time.

The launch of Nomad 0.12 introduces support for running Consul Connect native tasks, allowing users to directly utilize Connect features from their applications without relying on sidecar proxies like Envoy. This feature reduces overhead on cluster-wide resources by eliminating the need for sidecars, and simplifies task configuration for Nomad job authors. With Connect native, applications can reference Consul DNS names directly and establish secure connections using environment variables familiar to Consul itself. The new library provided by HashiCorp enables high-quality implementations for Go applications, while other languages can implement their own by following the provided guidance in the Connect documentation. This integration allows users to run non-sidecar enabled services on Nomad with minimal configuration changes, enabling more efficient and secure interactions within a Consul service mesh.

The technology preview of a Windows Active Directory (AD) provider for Terraform has been announced, allowing administrators to automate configuration and management of enterprise systems. This provider enables declarative administration of AD objects using the HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), manage this configuration in version control, and detect drift from the declared configuration. The provider is experimental and has some limitations, including only supporting a subset of Group Policy Objects and not managing group membership. It requires Terraform v0.12 or greater, an Active Directory test environment with WinRM enabled, and Windows Server 2012R2 or greater. Users can try out the provider by following the installation instructions provided in the Terraform Registry documentation. The provider is available through the Terraform Registry for convenience and offers various configuration options detailed in the registry documentation.