March 2021 Summaries

HashiCorp Education is sharing two new tutorials that teach developers how to deploy applications to Kubernetes clusters using Terraform providers, specifically the Helm provider for cluster management and the Datadog provider for automated monitoring of their clusters.` `The tutorials cover topics such as provisioning Kubernetes clusters with Terraform, authenticating with Helm providers, customizing deployments with values files, deploying chatbots and monitoring environments with the Datadog provider.

HashiCorp has announced the general availability of Consul-Terraform-Sync (CTS), a solution that enables network infrastructure automation leveraging Terraform's robust provider ecosystem. CTS automates day-2 networking tasks, reducing the burden on operators caused by manual ticketing systems. It allows users to define tasks for CTS to execute whenever a new service is registered or deregistered with Consul, including applying firewall policies and updating load balancer member pools. The solution has been tested at larger scales to ensure it can support expansive network architectures and securely manage sensitive information. Partner companies such as A10 Networks, Cisco, Check Point Software Technologies, F5, NS1, Palo Alto Networks, and VMware have integrated CTS with their products, enabling customers to automate common tasks and improve visibility across the infrastructure. The solution is now available for organizations to download and provides a better operator experience through enhancements like task lifecycle management, scalability, and security.

HashiCorp has released Vault 1.7 with several new features and improvements, including Integrated Storage Autopilot, Tokenization via Transform and the Key Management Secrets Engine. The release aims to improve core workflows, making key features production-ready for better serving use cases. Additionally, it includes performance and reliability enhancements, such as improved lease revocation and configurable headers for reads after writes. Other new features include Automatic Barrier Key Rotation, Terraform Cloud & Terraform Enterprise Secrets Engine, Snowflake Secrets Engine, and OpenLDAP Secrets Engine. The release also introduces a more operator-friendly experience with Integrated Storage Autopilot and provides better support for cloud providers such as Azure and AWS.

HashiCorp Nomad and Consul-focused talks from the 2021 HashiTalks community event have been made available. Talks covered topics such as adding observability to applications, implementing service meshes for Zero Trust security, building fast-moving environments with Vault and Consul, and using Nomad for stateful app orchestration. The event also featured demos of various use cases, including cloud networking automation and GitOps workflows. Additionally, talks on HashiCorp APIs, fuzz testing, and autoscaling Nomad jobs were showcased. The content is available in the HashiCorp Resource Library with full abstracts and slides for some sessions.

This tutorial on HashiCorp Learn teaches how to use application load balancers for blue-green and canary deployments, allowing developers to release new software with near-zero downtime. By using an AWS application load balancer (ALB) in combination with blue-green, canary, and rolling deployments, developers can incrementally promote a new application version via HashiCorp Terraform feature toggles. The tutorial also covers how to define ALB listeners and target groups to dynamically route traffic to services, enabling the running of canary tests and incremental deployment of new releases.

HashiCorp's Learn tutorial aims to teach enterprise patterns for Terraform modules, helping organizations apply these best practices to their workflows. By organizing infrastructure into modules, teams can reuse configurations, saving time and reducing errors. The tutorial covers coding best practices, such as clear organization and the DRY principle, and provides architectural recommendations for module creation, including principles for writing composable, shareable, and reusable modules. Upon completion, learners will be familiar with recommended enterprise patterns for modules and be able to apply them in their own organizations' workflows.

HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) now offers an hourly self-service option for customers to deploy production-ready HCP Consul clusters without a contractual commitment. This new offering provides flexible deployment mechanisms for enterprise-grade Consul clusters, with two tiers: Standard and Development. The Standard tier includes dedicated SLAs and HashiCorp support, while the Development tier offers Community support without SLAs. Pricing is based on usage, with a base price of $0.069 per hour for Small cluster sizes, plus an additional charge of $0.03 per service instance per hour. Users can create accounts, add payment methods, and deploy clusters using the self-service option, which is available today.

We're open sourcing How HashiCorp Works, a website that outlines HashiCorp's best practices for individual, team, and company-wide operations. The site was initially created as an internal resource to document the company's cultural norms and working practices, with the goal of making them accessible to new employees. By open-sourcing this information, HashiCorp aims to pay it forward and inspire other organizations to adopt similar practices. The website provides documentation on various topics, including remote work setup and decision-making processes, and is regularly updated to reflect the company's evolving practices.

Boundary Desktop is the new macOS desktop application that allows users to connect to remote targets and view active session details in a convenient and user-friendly interface. The latest release of Boundary 0.1.8 includes various improvements and bug fixes, such as list filtering, worker tag improvements, and improved error handling. Boundary Desktop offers a range of features including finding, connecting, and managing resources, and is considered stable enough for end-users to start using. Future updates will include additional features like support for Windows, resource filtering, and improved user controls. Users can get started with Boundary Desktop by following the guide and contributing to the project through GitHub issues or pull requests.

The Terraform Enterprise provider can be used to automate workflows in Terraform Cloud by codifying workspaces, teams, and processes. Automating the provisioning process for three version-control backed workspaces, creating three teams to manage them, and configuring run triggers is a key part of this automation. This automation enables teams to manage their Terraform Cloud permissions in a safe and reliable manner, ultimately streamlining workflow management.

HashiCorp has added 13 new verified providers to its Terraform ecosystem within the last three months, expanding its reach and making it easier for users to deploy infrastructure across various cloud environments using infrastructure as code. These new providers are owned and maintained by HashiCorp technology partners who have gone through the company's partner onboarding process. The additions include Alkira Network Cloud solution, Anexia, Buildkite, Checkly, Cisco DCNM, Dynatrace, iLert, Lacework, Logz.io, Nutanix, Rollbar, Upcloud, and ZeroTIER, which provide a range of services from network management to cloud security and observability. The growing ecosystem now boasts over 800 Terraform providers, with more than 5,000 modules available for use. This expansion enhances the community's ability to provision and manage infrastructure as code, making it easier to deploy and manage complex systems.

Watch these highlighted talks from our 2021 HashiTalks community event, featuring HashiCorp Boundary, Packer, Vagrant, and Waypoint. Over 10,000 people watched the third annual global HashiTalks livestream, which was expanded to 48 hours due to a high number of quality talk submissions. The talks cover various topics, including deploying tools on Azure with Terraform, using Boundary for identity-based multi-cloud access, introducing Packer to organizations and leveraging it for architectural enablement, configuring Python development environments with Vagrant, and building and deploying applications to Kubernetes with GitLab and Waypoint. Additionally, there are product-agnostic talks on information theory, measuring DevOps success with pipeline analytics, working with Envoy proxy, and more.

Managed Identities are an identity and access management feature of Microsoft's Azure cloud offering that assigns identities to machines. This comes in two flavors: System-assigned identities, which are tied to the lifecycle of a resource and automatically deleted when the resource is deleted, and user-assigned identities, which can be scoped to a subscription or group of resources and require manual management to avoid identity sprawl. HashiCorp Terraform and Packer fully support Managed Identities as an authentication method, allowing users to securely authenticate with Azure without having to configure sensitive credentials in their code. This eliminates the need for secure secret introduction and makes it easier to manage access to cloud resources. With Managed Identities, users can provision identities and authenticate with Azure using a Terraform resource or Packer image build, streamlining their workflow and reducing the risk of identity sprawl.

Terraform Cloud's Business tier offers a new way to manage resources in isolated, private, or on-premises environments by utilizing self-hosted agents. These agents securely connect back to Terraform Cloud, retrieve work needing to be completed, apply changes, and return results. The transition to using these agents is nearly seamless, with configuration areas including agent pools and token management. Organizations can deploy agents in various ways, such as container images or binary deployments, and pair them with supervisors like HashiCorp Nomad for resiliency. Once deployed, agents can be viewed in the Agents sub-section, providing information on their status, ID, IP address, and last check-in time. To use Terraform Cloud consistently in private environments, organizations must configure their workspace to use a configured agent pool, selecting the desired agent pool for processing Terraform operations. This feature is available in the Business tier of Terraform Cloud, which also includes other enterprise-grade features like managing resources more efficiently without modifying ingress networking policies.

To manage provider versions effectively, it's recommended to use either specifying provider version constraints in the configuration block or utilizing the dependency lock file, which was introduced in Terraform 0.14. By doing so, users can avoid downloading the latest version of providers, which may lead to unexpected infrastructure changes. The new tutorial on HashiCorp Learn will guide users through both methods, enabling them to create consistent and reliable Terraform runs across multiple users and automation tools.

This summary provides an overview of testing strategies for HashiCorp Terraform modules and configuration. It discusses the importance of unit tests, which verify individual resources and configurations, and contract tests, which check that a configuration using a Terraform module passes properly formatted inputs. Integration tests require active infrastructure resources to run and verify that a configuration creates the resources successfully. End-to-end tests check if changes did not break expected functionality in production environments. Testing Terraform modules involves writing unit, contract, and integration tests, while testing Terraform configuration applied to environments includes end-to-end tests. The summary concludes by highlighting the importance of automating tests to reduce manual verification time before reaching production, and provides additional resources for further learning on Terraform testing tools and best practices.

HashiCorp has released HashiCorp Consul-Terraform-Sync (CTS) in beta, a solution that enables network infrastructure automation leveraging Terraform's robust provider ecosystem. CTS automates day-2 networking tasks and reduces the burden on operators caused by manual ticketing systems. It leverages both Consul's service networking capabilities and Terraform's provider ecosystem to automate common networking practices such as applying firewall policies and updating load balancer member pools. The beta release introduces additional enhancements for a better operator experience, including task lifecycle management, scalability and security features, and partnerships with several major network equipment vendors. CTS is available in beta for organizations to download and provides a more secure way to manage network infrastructure footprint using Consul and Terraform.

HashiCorp Consul Service (HCS) on Azure has received updates, including federation for HCS clusters, which allows organizations to manage applications across multiple runtime platforms. The service also now has an official Terraform provider, enabling users to deploy and manage HCS clusters through their workflow. Additionally, HashiCorp has released integrations with Azure DevOps, providing a simpler way to manage Azure resources using Terraform. Other updates include the Terraform module for Azure's Enterprise-scale landing zone architecture, as well as support for Azure Key Vault in HashiCorp Vault's Key Management Secrets Engine. These updates aim to simplify and enhance the use of Consul Service on Azure, making it easier for organizations to discover and securely connect applications across various Azure environments.