February 2023 Summaries

HashiCorp Vault is now generally available as a fully managed service on Microsoft Azure, supporting production workloads running on the platform. This release marks another milestone in the partnership between HashiCorp and Microsoft, expanding HCP Vault's compatibility beyond Amazon Web Services (AWS) environments. New and current users can deploy HCP Vault on Azure to manage secrets and encryption capabilities for applications running on Azure Virtual Machines or Azure Kubernetes Service. The service is available in various regions across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific, with additional region options planned for the future.

HashiCorp has expanded its Terraform ecosystem by welcoming new integrations for Terraform Cloud, Enterprise, and open source (OSS) users. These integrations provide additional options to automate and secure cloud infrastructure management, including support from partners such as Palo Alto Networks and Pluralith for Terraform Cloud run task integrations, and 13 new verified Terraform providers from partners like Ariga Technologies, Cisco Systems Inc, and Dell Inc for Terraform Enterprise and OSS users. These integrations enable users to deploy and manage their cloud and on-premises infrastructure more efficiently, with features such as pre-plan and post-plan run tasks, visualized workflows, and resource management for specific platforms like PowerMax storage arrays and AOS-CX switches.

Women in leadership at HashiCorp share their experiences and approaches to hiring and retaining technical women, highlighting the importance of representation, hiring for potential, career progression, pay transparency, and fostering an inclusive environment. Despite efforts to promote diversity, women are leaving leadership positions twice as fast as men due to internal politics, lack of recognition, unsupportive working environments, and lack of diversity. Organizations can make a positive impact by understanding the breadth of the issue, collecting data from reports like Women in the Workplace, and implementing real-world approaches to attract and retain technical talent from diverse backgrounds. By doing so, they can create a culture that supports women's growth and success, ultimately contributing to a more equitable and inclusive tech sector.

TerraCurl is a utility Terraform provider that enables engineers to make managed and unmanaged API calls in their Terraform code, allowing them to work around unsupported resources in Terraform providers. It provides instructions for creating and deleting resources, as well as reading data from responses and handling errors with retry logic. The provider can be used in both managed and unmanaged API calls, and it supports authenticated and mutually authenticated calls with TLS. With its flexible design, TerraCurl opens up new possibilities and use cases in workflows, making it a valuable tool for engineers working with Terraform.

HashiCorp Waypoint 0.11 introduces improved integration with Terraform Cloud, allowing for quicker deployment and management of applications through a consistent abstraction of underlying infrastructure. The new version also includes features such as simplified variable stanzas for configsourcer plugins, a user-facing API to create integrations with Terraform providers, and a new library for plugin discoverability. Additionally, Waypoint 0.11 enables the creation of Terraform modules that correspond to plugins, making it easier to manage long-lived infrastructure with Terraform and orchestrate builds, deployments, and releases with Waypoint. The release also includes other improvements such as pagination in the CLI, improved AWS Lambda plugin, and updated Amazon ECS plugin.

HashiCorp Boundary 0.12 has been released, introducing several key features to improve security, usability, and flexibility. Multi-hop sessions allow for secure access to infrastructure resources without exposing workers on private networks, while credential injection using Vault SSH certificates provides an additional layer of protection. Credential templating enables administrators to map credentials directly to users within a target, reducing the need for separate targets per user credential. Key lifecycle management allows for rotation and destruction of encryption keys, while JSON credentials provide more flexibility in the types of credentials that can be brokered. Additionally, authentication UX improvements make it easier for users to authenticate without requiring an auth method ID. These updates aim to enhance the security, scalability, and usability of HashiCorp Boundary, making it a more effective identity-based remote access solution for individuals and teams operating at any scale.

HashiCorp's Cloud Platform has expanded its support for HCP Vault and HCP Consul to new AWS regions in the U.S., Canada, and Japan, including North Virginia, Ohio, Oregon, Central Canada, Frankfurt, Ireland, London, Tokyo, Singapore, and Sydney. This expansion allows organizations to increase service performance and lower request round-trip latency by deploying infrastructure across multiple geographically distributed AWS regions. HCP Vault has also gained multi-region replication support, enabling customers to run a production-grade cluster in one region and replicate it to another for lower latency between applications in multi-region deployments. The service provides secure secrets management across various AWS services, including EC2, EKS, Lambda, and more, making it easier to centralize access control and encryption keys. With the addition of new integrations and features, HashiCorp's Cloud Platform continues to grow its ecosystem, offering a range of solutions for infrastructure management and security.

The beta release of HashiCorp Nomad 1.5 is now available, offering improved management of security and access with single sign-on and OIDC support, as well as added features such as dynamic node metadata, policy management in the UI, task API access, job templates, and a new ACL policies and tokens UI. These updates aim to simplify credential management, enhance scheduling decisions, and provide better task communication, while also introducing UI improvements and community engagement opportunities. Nomad 1.5 is now available for download from the project website, with tutorials and contributing documentation available on the HashiCorp Learn site and GitHub.

A developer advocate needs to carefully select conferences and events to submit their talks to, considering factors such as the audience's level of experience, the event's goals, and the speaker's expertise. To make an informed decision, they should create a list of potential events, set a realistic schedule with deadlines, and follow up with event coordinators or colleagues for feedback. By doing so, they can ensure their talks are well-suited to the audience and increase their chances of acceptance. This involves considering their own level of expertise, the relevance of their talk topic, and the potential impact on the audience.

HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) now supports OpenID Connect (OIDC) protocol for single sign-on (SSO) integrations, providing organizations with more options to integrate identity providers into their cloud platform. This popular SSO solution enables clients to verify end-users' identities and obtain basic profile information in an interoperable manner. With full support for OIDC authentication methods, HCP allows users to delegate authentication to their preferred OIDP, making it simpler to implement than SAML and more accessible through APIs. The addition of OIDC SSO also enables integration with popular identity providers like Microsoft Azure Active Directory and Okta, and is the first step in allowing all HCP products to integrate with each other through a single seamless authentication workflow.