April 2022 Summaries

The Consul API Gateway 0.2 has been released and is now generally available. This update enhances traffic management capabilities by adding cross-namespace reference policy enforcement for better control over how traffic is routed between Kubernetes namespaces. Previously, users could route requests across various namespaces without explicit permissions, but this new feature allows more granular restrictions or permissions to be set. The Consul API Gateway 0.2 solves this challenge using cross-namespace reference policies, which can help prevent unauthorized access and improve security.

The 2022 HashiCorp Partner Network Awards for Systems Integrators and Resellers have been announced, celebrating partners' commitment to helping enterprises accelerate their cloud adoption strategies. Winners in the five categories include AHEAD (Americas RSI Partner of the Year), TeraSky (EMEA RSI Partner of the Year), LAC (APAC RSI Partner of the Year), Accenture (GSI Partner of the Year), and River Point Technology (Innovation SI Partner of the Year). These partners have delivered significant technology capabilities into the market relating to HashiCorp's portfolio, assisted with growing HashiCorp's capabilities, and consistently delivered value to joint customers through services and innovation initiatives.

Terraform Cloud has introduced a new search capability that allows users to easily switch between workspaces and organizations in the UI. This feature, called Terraform Cloud Search, is available for all tiers of Terraform Cloud and soon in Terraform Enterprise. The search functionality can be accessed through a magnifying glass icon or by using the keyboard shortcut "command + k." Users can search workspaces or organizations and switch directly to the desired item with live filtering. This feature is available throughout the console, allowing users to switch between workspaces and organizations without navigating back to the main page.

HashiCorp has released Consul 1.12, which enhances zero trust security architecture by leveraging HashiCorp Vault to reduce secrets sprawl and automate server TLS certificate rotation for Consul on Kubernetes users. The update also helps users better understand their Consul datacenter status and access control list (ACL) system behavior. Additionally, the release includes improved ACL troubleshooting and a new GUI overview page for easier navigation and understanding of the Consul installation's health and configuration.

The HashiCorp Terraform Registry has updated its display of download count metrics in both public and private registries to provide more detailed information about usage. Previously, a single "total provisions" count was shown alongside other metadata about a module or provider on the landing page. Now, four numbers are displayed: Downloads this week, Downloads this month, Downloads this year, and Downloads all time. This change allows users to assess a module or provider more accurately and provides admins and owners with additional information for analysis. The evolution of how download counts are measured has also been discussed, highlighting the improvements made in processing, storage, and presentation of these metrics.

HashiCorp has partnered with AWS to enhance security on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS) by integrating HashiCorp Vault, an enterprise secrets management solution. This collaboration allows users to enable and start up Vault instances in EKS. The partnership also includes the development of an add-on repository for EKS Blueprints, which is an infrastructure as code framework designed to make it easier and faster for customers to adopt Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service (EKS). The HashiCorp Vault Add-On for Amazon EKS simplifies secrets management in Kubernetes clusters by enabling users to quickly enable the Vault add-on within EKS with one command.

A cheat sheet has been designed for Kubernetes users to learn HashiCorp Nomad concepts and commands quickly. The one-page reference PDF includes a list of Kubernetes commands with their Nomad equivalents, as well as a list of Kubernetes concepts and their Nomad counterparts. Additionally, a GitHub page has been started for collecting more Nomad cheat sheets, allowing the community to contribute edits, additions, or ideas for new cheat sheets.

HashiCorp has achieved Amazon Web Services (AWS) DevOps Competency for development, security, and operations (DevSecOps), recognizing its technical proficiency and proven customer success in the field of DevSecOps. The company helps customers secure their environments with HashiCorp Terraform and Sentinel. Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as code software tool that provides a consistent CLI workflow to manage hundreds of cloud services, while Sentinel is an embedded policy-as-code framework for fine-grained, logic-based policy decisions. The new AWS DevOps Competency for DevSecOps recognizes solutions that integrate security across every stage of the development and delivery cycles, providing rapid and contextual feedback to development, security, and ops teams.

In the past six months, HashiCorp Consul ecosystem has seen rapid growth with 10 new integrations. These include three new HCP Consul verified integrations, three new Consul Enterprise integrations, and four new open source Consul integrations. The number of new Consul integrations nearly doubled from the previous year as partners continue to lean towards network infrastructure automation and observability integrations. Some key integrations are with Dynatrace, Cisco AppDynamics, Traefik Labs, Fortinet, Red Hat, Datadog, Sysdig, and VMware. The HashiCorp Consul Integration Program allows partners to integrate their products to work with Consul open source, Enterprise, or HCP Consul.

HashiCorp Consul on Amazon Elastic Container Service (ECS) 0.4 is now generally available, offering multi-tenancy support with administrative partitions and namespaces to help organizations reduce operational complexity and seamlessly integrate service mesh into their application workflows. Namespaces allow global operators to create isolated environments in a shared cluster and apply any required service access restrictions for authenticated users. Multi-tenancy with admin partitions provides a shared service-networking solution for multiple tenants within a single Consul datacenter, improving operational efficiency while giving individual teams the organizational autonomy and isolation required to manage their services as they see fit.

The HashiCorp Vault Developer Experience team has introduced three sample applications in C#, Go, and Java to demonstrate using Vault in a real-world environment. These are cloneable, out-of-the-box examples that require no previous knowledge of Vault. They cover static secrets, dynamic secrets, authentication, and token renewal features. The first blog post focuses on static secrets, where Vault can encrypt and store sensitive information like API keys in its persistent storage, allowing applications to retrieve the secrets only when needed.

HashiCorp has released version 0.8 of Waypoint, an application deployment tool that aims to deliver a PaaS-like experience for Kubernetes, Amazon ECS, and other platforms. The new release introduces several significant features, including secret values for input variables, targetable runners, runner adoption, instance counts in deployment status reports, and a Waypoint job command line tool for job introspection. These enhancements aim to improve the user experience and provide more control over application deployments.

HashiCorp has expanded multi-factor authentication (MFA) support across its open source and all HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) Vault tiers, previously available only through Vault Enterprise. This release adds login MFA support for Vault OSS and HCP Vault, enhancing zero trust security best practices for all users. The new integration offers an additional authentication step using time-based one-time password (TOTP), Okta, Duo, or PingIdentity. As sophisticated attacks from hackers and ransomware increase each year, organizations need modern, automated security solutions that rely heavily on identity to protect critical infrastructure. Adding MFA to Vault open source and HCP Vault makes identity-based security for both humans and machines consistent and accessible at all levels of infrastructure.

This article discusses how to securely inject secrets into Flux or other GitOps tools on Kubernetes using HashiCorp Vault and the Secrets Store CSI driver. It presents two approaches for configuring a Kubernetes application deployed by the Flux framework to use secrets from Vault: file-based approach with environment variables, and syncing as Kubernetes secrets. The latter is recommended when you need to use Kubernetes secrets for compatibility with a GitOps tool like Flux or if you want to minimize refactoring impact.

In Q1 2022, HashiCorp added six new HCP Vault verified integrations from Datadog, Grafana Labs, Redis, Red Hat, Splunk, and UiPath. Additionally, four new self-managed HashiCorp Vault integrations were completed with Bloombase, Ondat, Tencent, and Troussseau KMS provider plugin. These integrations enhance the functionality of HCP Vault by enabling monitoring, visualization, and management of sensitive data across various platforms. The HashiCorp Vault Integration Program allows partners to integrate their products with HashiCorp Vault or HCP Vault for seamless collaboration and improved security.