May 2022 Summaries

HashiCorp has announced the general availability of Consul-Terraform-Sync (CTS) 0.6, marking another step in the maturity of its Network Infrastructure Automation (NIA) solution. CTS combines the functionality of HashiCorp Terraform and HashiCorp Consul to eliminate manual ticket-based systems across on-premises and cloud environments. The new release introduces features such as auto registration of CTS as a service with Consul, health checking on CTS using the newly added Health API endpoint, support for per-task execution mode with Terraform Cloud Agent, and compatibility with HCP Consul. Additionally, HashiCorp has expanded its practitioner and partner ecosystem to help users automate manual networking tasks.

The Cloud Development Kit for Terraform (CDKTF) 0.11 has been released with new features to simplify adding providers and improve debugging processes. A new command, "cdktf provider add," allows users to quickly and easily add prebuilt or local provider packages to their CDKTF applications without having to check for the existence of a prebuilt package themselves. Additionally, improved debugging tools now include relevant version information in CLI error messages. The release also includes enhancements to working with lists and new documentation pages on debugging and best practices.

HashiCorp has adopted the community-created HCL Extension for Visual Studio Code and added support for HCL 2.0. This transition allows HashiCorp to provide a consistent editing experience for both Terraform users and users of other HCL-based products, as well as deliver updates that accurately reflect changes in the language. The new HCL Extension supports all constructs introduced with HCL v2, including first-class support for expressions and type constraints.

HashiCorp has welcomed 18 new verified providers into its growing Terraform ecosystem, reaching a significant milestone with 200 verified Terraform providers. These new additions include Arista CloudVision, Auth0, Cisco IOS XE, Clumio, Delphix, DevCycle, FireHydrant, Fortinet, Harness, Kion, Lumin Technologies, Netris.ai, Neustar UltraDNS, NTT Communications Flexible InterConnect, Rockset, Site24x7, StackBill, and Vercel. These providers have gone through the partner-onboarding process and earned the "verified" tag to ensure their legitimacy. The growth of HashiCorp's Terraform provider ecosystem continues to accelerate, allowing practitioners to automate the use of an even wider set of tools throughout their infrastructure deployments.

In recognition of Global Accessibility Awareness Day (GAAD), two HashiCorp engineers discussed accessible design and engineering at the company. They touched on principles, tools, and community efforts to improve web accessibility. The conversation highlighted the importance of empathy for users from all walks of life and the growing community supporting accessibility initiatives.

HashiCorp has released version 0.8 of its Boundary secure remote access tool, along with an updated Boundary Desktop 1.4.3. The latest release includes new health monitoring observability metrics using Prometheus and expanded event logs for better visibility into the system's operations. Additionally, support for worker tags in the admin UI has been added, allowing users to specify which workers can handle a session. These updates aim to improve security admins' understanding and monitoring of their organization's use of Boundary and infrastructure access.

HashiCorp Terraform 1.2 is now generally available, introducing exception handling with pre- and post-conditions, support for non-interactive Terraform Cloud operations in a CI/CD pipeline, and CLI support for Run Tasks. Preconditions and postconditions allow practitioners to capture assumptions in configuration and raise errors earlier and in context, while the new environment variables enhance the cloud integration's flexibility. Additionally, Run Tasks CLI support provides immediate access to the full context of Terraform workflows.

HashiCorp has announced the general availability of Nomad 1.3, an update that includes built-in service discovery, improved edge compute support, Container Storage Interface (CSI) general availability, and more. The new features aim to enhance user experience and improve functionality for managing containers and non-containerized applications across on-premises and cloud environments. Key improvements in Nomad 1.3 include native service discovery, which allows users to easily make requests to other tasks by discovering address and port information through template stanzas or the Nomad API; edge and reconnected workload support for geographically distributed edge clients; CSI general availability with topology feature support; new Evaluations UI for viewing evaluation information; and various quality of life improvements and bug fixes. Nomad Pack, a tool that helps users easily run common applications, templatize their applications, and share configuration with the Nomad community, has also received several updates to improve its integration into CI/CD workflows and make it easier for new users to get started writing custom packs.

HashiCorp has released its official Releases API, a centralized platform providing extended metadata about every HashiCorp product release hosted on the release site, HashiCorp Releases. The API includes useful information such as links to release notes, licenses, associated repositories, and more. This consolidated data source aims to simplify the process of finding relevant information for practitioners making decisions about upgrades, downgrades, and other actions related to HashiCorp products.

Edge computing has evolved from a buzzword to an increasingly adopted distributed computing approach that involves distributing compute, networking, and storage closer to the source of data generation or end users. This shift is driven by the need for reduced latency, improved end-user experience, and cost savings. However, managing applications and devices at the edge can be challenging due to resource constraints, intermittent connectivity, and diverse infrastructure and applications that require remote management. HashiCorp Nomad has gained popularity as a scheduler or orchestration tool for deploying workloads across gaming, biotech, farming technologies, and other industries at the edge. It helps organizations address three top challenges: simplifying distributed deployments, improving operational efficiency at the edge, and managing heterogeneous environments. Nomad supports different edge deployment strategies, such as distributed multi-cluster deployments or a distributed single cluster topology that centralizes servers in one region while geographically distributing clients. This latter approach offers a unified control plane for all workloads but may have less isolation between applications and increased susceptibility to network latency issues. Bowery Farming, an indoor vertical farming company, has implemented Nomad's distributed single cluster topology in production, allowing it to manage services and infrastructure running both in the public cloud (AWS) and on-premises in its farms. AccelByte, a backend tools platform for multiplayer online video games, uses Nomad to manage its fleet of game servers across multiple regions with varying demand levels, ensuring low latency performance and autoscaling capabilities. Nomad's flexible workload support enables users to manage various applications in heterogeneous edge environments, supporting a variety of devices and operating systems. Radix Labs, a lab automation company, uses Nomad task drivers to operate diverse sets of instrumentation within biology labs, allowing it to run as root and access equipment like mass spectrometers and centrifuges by fingerprinting them and creating device-specific drivers. In summary, HashiCorp Nomad offers flexibility and control for deploying and managing edge workloads across diverse industries and use cases, addressing the challenges of distributed computing at the edge.

This blog post discusses how to add OpenTelemetry instrumentation to Java or .NET applications on Kubernetes and combine them with Consul service mesh metrics and traces for use with Prometheus and Jaeger. It covers the setup of end-to-end tracing, enabling service mesh proxy and application metrics, configuring Consul service mesh to track Envoy traces as Zipkin spans, and more. The post also emphasizes the importance of using consistent metrics and tracing formats when building instrumentation in applications.

Oscar Medina, a senior cloud architect at Amazon Web Services, demonstrated a collaborative workflow for platform and developer teams using CDK for Terraform, Terraform Cloud, and Sentinel to safely deploy EKS workloads to AWS. The workflow enables self-service Amazon EKS deployments for developers while ensuring that essential guardrails remain in place. It leverages several tools and platforms, including Amazon EKS, CDK for Terraform, Terraform Cloud, and Sentinel policies. This approach allows platform teams to manage costs by preventing users from deploying services of the LoadBalancer type, while developer teams can use TypeScript to define infrastructure configurations.

Terraform Cloud has introduced Run Tasks, which allow for the integration of security, compliance, and cost management tools into its workflow. This feature is now generally available and enables organizations to automate code reviews using third-party tools. Some use cases include ensuring security through tools like Snyk and Bridgecrew, providing visibility into infrastructure costs with Infracost, Vantage, or Kion, and maintaining regulatory compliance with Bridgecrew or Kion. Run Tasks are available in the Terraform Cloud Business Tier and will soon be included in Terraform Enterprise.