July 2022 Summaries

HashiCorp's Early Career Program offers opportunities for students on various career paths, with some interns working remotely and others in-office. The program has its challenges, but also provides valuable learning experiences and growth opportunities. Interns have reported being drawn to the company due to its values, products, and working environment. Challenges faced include figuring out new technologies and adapting to remote work environments. Rewards include learning from experienced teams, receiving validation and affirmation, and gaining practical experience. Dream jobs pursued by interns vary, but often involve roles in software engineering, product management, or consulting. Advice for future interns includes reaching out to people, asking questions, staying focused, and treating the internship like a networking class.

The evolution of modern service-based networking solutions relies on core workflows including discovering services, securing networks, automating networking tasks, and controlling access. Service discovery tools like HashiCorp Consul automate the process of identifying what is running on a network, knowing where it's located, and if it's reachable in real-time. This shift away from static IP-based networking toward service-identity based networking has cascading effects on security policies, requiring consistent enforcement mechanisms around application identities. Automation principles can be applied to key networking hardware, enabling ongoing management of environments and reducing manual tasks for operators. A service mesh can assist with traffic management policies, mutual authentication, and encryption, but is not applicable to every environment. Controlling network access requires a central control plane that manages access based on service identities, consistent across cloud and non-cloud environments. The core goal remains moving away from IP-based networking to service-based networking, allowing networks to match the velocity of modern application delivery practices without compromising consistency in deployment and management or security policies.

HCP Consul on Microsoft Azure is now generally available, supporting production workloads running on Azure, providing a secure and resilient service mesh for connecting applications in Azure. This announcement marks the latest milestone in the HashiCorp and Microsoft collaboration, offering a fully managed service mesh solution on HashiCorp backed infrastructure. With this release, HCP Consul users can deploy it on Azure Virtual Machines or Azure Kubernetes Service, enabling enterprises to deploy more resilient and secure microservice environments without added operational burden. The launch is part of HashiCorp's goal to be a multi-cloud solution, and HCP Consul on Azure is available for all users with either on-demand hourly consumption or annual deals.

The HashiCorp Vault ecosystem continues to expand with 12 new integrations added this quarter, including HCP, Enterprise, and OSS integrations. This growth demonstrates the increasing adoption of Vault as a tool for securing applications and protecting sensitive data. New integrations include partnerships with Cribl, Torq, Traefik Labs, Commvault, Entrust, MongoDB, Percona, Thales, and Yugabyte, among others. These integrations enable organizations to leverage Vault's managed key management features, such as the new Managed Keys feature, to improve security postures and automate secrets management. With these additions, HashiCorp continues to strengthen its position in the cloud security market.

Synchronize HCP Consul services as backend address pools for Microsoft Azure Application Gateway using Consul-Terraform-Sync (CTS) to automate the synchronization of service changes in Consul open source or Enterprise to Azure Application Gateway. CTS uses a HashiCorp Terraform module compatible with HashiCorp Consul-Terraform-Sync to connect to the service catalog of HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) Consul and monitor for service-level changes. When a change is detected, it runs a Terraform module in response to an event and automates the target resource of your choice, offering a GitOps workflow for managing an application gateway. CTS connects to the service catalog of HCP Consul and monitors for service-level changes. It then uses this information to automatically add new services as backend address pools to a load balancer in Azure Application Gateway, ensuring that any changes made to services are reflected in the configuration. The example demonstrates how to set up a Consul cluster and register services to its catalog, configure Consul-Terraform-Sync, and automate Azure Application Gateway using CTS. By running CTS locally and passing information about the Azure resource group, location, public IP, service subnet, and port of the application gateway as Terraform variable files, you can dynamically generate a request routing rule, HTTP listener, and URL path map for routes. After running CTS, access the services using the load balancer's frontend public IP address and make API calls to the web service at the /web path to verify that the backend address pool has been updated correctly. The example also shows how Consul-Terraform-Sync runs as a daemon, monitoring for changes to the services in Consul's catalog and responding to these changes by running Terraform modules. This enables a GitOps workflow to update and continuously deliver changes to your Azure networking resources. By using CTS with a declarative Terraform module, you can implement a secure and efficient way to manage your application gateway configuration.

HashiCorp launched its Early Career Program in September 2020 and has since grown to include over 70 interns from diverse backgrounds. The program received over 19,000 applications for the 2022 cohort, with students hailing from 21 different states and Canada. As a remote company, HashiCorp offers fully remote internships to most participants, with some exceptions based in Austin, Texas. The Early Career Program aims to provide interns with valuable work experience and skills development before entering the full-time workforce.

The HashiCorp Terraform Azure Stack provider 1.0 release includes several provider behavior improvements, new resources for compute, networking, DNS, and Key Vault services, and supports a new service for Key Vault. The provider is now compatible with Terraform 0.12 and later, but no longer supports versions 0.10 and 0.11. The update introduces custom timeouts, resource group safe delete 'on' by default, features blocks, and allows importing existing resources into the state. Additionally, some deprecated fields, data sources, and resources have been removed from the provider, including the security_provider_name field under the azurestack_virtual_wan resource, which is no longer supported by Azure. The update also includes new resources such as separate Windows and Linux virtual machine scale sets, eight new DNS resources, and initial support for new Key Vault services.

HashiCorp has been chosen as the 2022 Microsoft US (MSUS) Partner Award winner for OSS on Azure and was also recognized as a finalist in the 2022 Microsoft OSS on Azure Partner of the Year Award. HashiCorp's collaboration with Microsoft Azure has led to innovative product solutions that help customers move their infrastructure to the cloud, reduce complexity, and implement zero trust security models. The company has extended its solution stack with Azure, including updates for Terraform Module Azure Landing Zones, and has announced a strategic partnership with Microsoft to make zero trust security more accessible with identity-based security solutions. HashiCorp's commitment to supporting customers on Microsoft Azure has been recognized by Microsoft for the fourth consecutive year, with awards in various categories including OSS on Azure, Partner of the Year Award, and Alliance Global ISV Partner of the Year Award.

HashiCorp's HashiConf Europe 2022 took place in Amsterdam, with over 700 attendees in-person and 4,000 online, featuring daily keynotes, breakout sessions, and product workshops. The event announced several significant developments for HashiCorp products, including HCP Waypoint private beta program, Drift Detection for Terraform Cloud, and enhancements for Consul and Vault. The conference also marked the return of in-person events after a two-year hiatus, with planning already underway for HashiConf Global 2022 in Los Angeles later this year.