May 2023 Summaries

The Terraform AWS provider has released version 5.0, bringing improvements to default tags, which can now be set at the provider level and applied to all supported resources in the configuration. This update aligns with community expectations and solves issues such as inconsistent final plans, identical tags, and perpetual diffs within tag configurations. The release also removes deprecated attributes and functionality, including EC2-Classic networking, and introduces new features like Amazon CloudWatch Observability Access Manager, Amazon EC2 Recycle Bin, and Amazon QuickSight. This update improves productivity and reduces risk for practitioners, enabling them to manage tags more efficiently and securely provision cloud infrastructure.

The HashiCorp company has released new pipeline templates for Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise, providing prescriptive guides for integrating with these platforms. The new integration tool, tfci, automates Terraform Cloud runs via API and supports common operations, allowing users to onboard Terraform Cloud into more complex CI/CD pipelines. The templates are available for GitHub Actions and GitLab CI, with plans to add additional workflows and platforms in the future. This move aims to reduce friction in integrating Terraform Cloud with CI/CD tools, making it easier for users to leverage the capabilities of Terraform Cloud.

HashiCorp has announced support for deploying Azure Linux container host for Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) using their Terraform tool. This allows users to leverage the secure, performant, and fully native AKS container host with a streamlined image tailored and optimized for AKS. HashiCorp Terraform Cloud provides no-code provisioning capabilities, enabling developers with limited infrastructure knowledge to provision resources without writing Terraform configuration code. The company has a deep collaboration with Microsoft, supporting the provisioning of resources on Microsoft Azure, and automating provisioning and security based on infrastructure and policy as code. With this support, users can improve their security in Terraform by using Vault-backed dynamic provider credentials with Terraform Cloud on Azure.

HCP Packer has released two new features to its channels, providing platform teams with more visibility into their artifact estate and shortening times to remediation. Channels allow for versioning and tagging image artifacts to maintain up-to-date infrastructure, and the new restricted channel feature provides granular permissions control to limit access to channel updates. The channel overview page provides a centralized location for reviewing details on an iteration, while the channel assignment history page tracks activity in a channel and allows for quicker remediation of released artifacts through rollback. Additionally, HCP Packer's integration with Terraform Cloud enables users to simplify the creation of golden images and track image metadata and storage location.

This partnership between HashiCorp and Microsoft enables the creation of a reference architecture for Terraform modules that follow Microsoft's Azure Well-Architected Framework and security best practices. The architecture uses an N-tier model, which is commonly used for traditional on-premises applications migrating to Azure infrastructure. The solution incorporates three key security utilities: Microsoft Defender for Cloud, dynamic provider credentials in Terraform Cloud, and HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) Vault. These tools provide a defense-in-depth approach to cloud vulnerabilities, enabling organizations to maintain secure and reliable infrastructure while adhering to compliance and best practices. By integrating these security features into an infrastructure as code workflow, organizations can ensure their cloud deployments are secure, compliant, and easily maintainable.

Terraform Cloud has introduced updates to its offerings, providing premium features in the Free tier and new paid tiers with increased concurrency and support. The updated Free tier offers SSO, policy as code, and cloud agents, while the new paid tiers provide team management, scaling concurrency, and enterprise support, along with consistent billing metrics based on managed resources. These updates aim to cater to smaller teams and organizations with a robust security posture from the start, while also providing easy upgrade paths for larger organizations.

HashiCorp is offering a scholarship program to support members from all backgrounds to attend the HashiConf Global conference in San Francisco, California, October 10-12. The company values diversity and strives to foster an inclusive community, with applicants considered based on three criteria: need, value, and impact. There are three categories of scholarships available, and a diverse group of reviewers will select winners from applications submitted by the deadline of June 11, 2023.

The ServiceNow Service Catalog integration for Terraform now allows users to select the execution mode for their Terraform workspaces, reducing API calls between ServiceNow and Terraform Cloud, and enhancing ticket comments and configuration testing. The new feature enables platform teams and admins to standardize and scale cloud adoption with approved configurations, making it easy for developers to focus on building applications. The integration also provides self-service provisioning with approved configurations, secure data, and efficient creation of infrastructure from the ServiceNow Catalog interface based on Terraform code.

The HashiCorp Terraform ecosystem continues to expand with the addition of over 24 new partner integrations, simplifying customers' cloud infrastructure management. These integrations include AI-powered platforms like Aisera and Concourse Labs, as well as providers for popular services such as Dell Technologies PowerFlex, Fortinet, and Zscaler. The new integrations aim to provide additional options for Terraform Cloud, Enterprise, and open source users, enabling them to deploy and manage their cloud and on-premises infrastructure more efficiently.

HashiCorp Vault continues to expand its partner ecosystem with over a dozen new integrations, further solidifying its position as a leading multi-cloud security solution. The latest additions include HCP Vault integrations with Aerospike, JumpWire, Rootly, Cloudian, Dell PowerMax, Marvell Technology, NetApp, Nutanix, AccuKnox, Buildkite, Gurucul, Honeycomb, Ping Identity, SUSE | Rancher, and more. These integrations enhance the capabilities of Vault to simplify secrets management across infrastructure and applications, providing a secure foundation for modern multi-cloud security.

The Intel Cloud Optimized Modules for Terraform and Sentinel are designed to help organizations manage the complexity and efficiency of cloud migrations by automating resource choices according to best practices. These modules provide automated performance gains and lower costs, while also simplifying cloud infrastructure optimization through purpose-built policy as code sets. By leveraging Intel's unique technology, these modules enable organizations to minimize costs for cloud infrastructure, reduce security risks, and improve workstream efficiency. The modules work in tandem with Sentinel policy sets to ensure only the requisite hardware is consumed for business-critical workloads, allowing teams to take advantage of price-for-performance optimizations without additional development effort.

Platform teams focus on building and maintaining core systems and workflows for delivering infrastructure and other services to application teams, addressing historical problems with infrastructure provisioning and configuration. To succeed, platform teams must run like product teams, understanding the needs of their "customers" (application development teams) and stakeholders through user research, requirements gathering, and prioritization. They also need to collaborate with application teams while meeting industry and company standards for compliance, security, finance, and more. Platform teams should integrate representatives from stakeholder teams into ongoing communication cadence and requirements building processes, and treat the platform-building process like any other software project, taking an iterative approach and never considering the platform "done". By adopting product management strategies, platform teams can help developers safely ship software as quickly as possible while meeting organizational stakeholders' needs. Platform teams exist to cope with infrastructure's generational shift from manual to automated self-service processes, representing a specialization in addressing subject-matter differences between infrastructure and application development.