August 2023 Summaries

Visit us at Google Cloud Next ‘23 in San Francisco, Aug. 29 - 31, to attend breakout sessions, expert talks, and product demos to accelerate your cloud strategy. HashiCorp will be present with the latest news on its long-standing relationship with Google Cloud, covering topics such as dynamic provider credentials, continuous validation, Terraform Cloud Operator for Kubernetes, and more. The company has achieved a significant milestone with 359 million downloads of the Google Cloud Platform provider for Terraform, and is developing new integrations to help customers work faster and use more services and features. HashiCorp will also showcase its products and provide demos at booth #1645 during the event. Additionally, attendees can join upcoming webinars covering Google Cloud projects that use Terraform as their foundation and learn about HashiCorp's Magic Quadrant debut in Gartner’s privileged access management.

HashiCorp has adopted the Business Source License (BSL) v1.1 for all future releases of its products, aiming to make it short and simple. The BSL license provides interpretive guidance in FAQs, which users can rely on as official positions now and in the future. The company has updated its licensing FAQ based on community questions about the change, addressing common queries such as internal use, hosting services, competitive offerings, and mixing code with different licenses. The BSL license does not prevent developers from using HashiCorp tools to build competing products, but restricts embedding or hosting products in a manner competitive with commercial offerings. The license is compatible with most other licenses and allows for non-competitive use of HashiCorp products in OSS projects.

Ephemeral workspaces for Terraform Cloud Plus offer cost savings, increased efficiency, and improved security by automatically destroying non-production resources at scheduled times, reducing infrastructure costs and streamlining workspace management. This feature benefits organizations by giving them more time back to focus on other tasks, simplifying management and testing through the use of time-to-live settings, and improving compliance with security requirements. The auto-destroy feature can be easily configured through the UI or API, and notifications can be set up to send reminders before a destroy run is triggered, ensuring that infrastructure teams stay on top of their resource cleanup.

The newest CDKTF release, version 0.18, significantly improves synthesization times for TypeScript, Python, and Java, enhancing the user experience by reducing processing time from several seconds to under a second. The release also includes various performance-related best practices, improved use of namespaces to reduce synth time, and faster code execution thanks to an upgraded JSII compiler. Additionally, CDKTF 0.18 introduces features such as auto-translation of Terraform HCL code to CDKTF-compatible languages using the `cdktf convert` command, improved multi-language provider documentation, and plans for future releases that include basic support for config-driven import and better refactoring capabilities.

HashiCorp has announced five new integrations for Terraform Cloud, including Confluent, GitHub, GitLab, Orca Security, and ServiceNow, which provide additional options to automate and secure cloud infrastructure management. These integrations enable users to establish initial policy frameworks, implement CI/CD pipelines, run security checks, and automatically update configuration management databases. Additionally, HashiCorp has announced 10 new verified Terraform providers from partners, including Abbey Labs, Chainguard, Cisco Systems, Control Plane, OpsLevel, SingleStore, and VMware, which provide users with more flexibility to manage their cloud infrastructure using infrastructure as code.

HCP Vault Secrets extends secret sync capabilities to GitHub Actions, improves secret versioning, and adds a tutorial on using HCP Vault Secrets with Terraform, providing users with improved secrets management, syncing secrets from HCP Vault Secrets when and where they need them, resolving secrets sprawl issues, and ensuring access control setup and improved versioning for developers.

HashiCorp is adopting the Business Source License to ensure continued investment in its community while maintaining open, freely available products. The company's decision to adopt an open source model over a decade ago was driven by its desire to build a large community of users and contributors who benefit from its work on HashiCorp products. This approach has enabled HashiCorp to partner closely with cloud providers and other technology partners, but the company believes that commercial open source models need to evolve for the ecosystem to continue providing open software. As a result, HashiCorp is changing its license from Mozilla Public License v2.0 to the Business Source License v1.1 on all future releases of its products, allowing for copying, modification, redistribution, and non-commercial use under specific conditions. The new license includes additional usage grants that offer a fair and sustainable way for HashiCorp to share its source code widely.

The integration between AWS Service Catalog and HashiCorp Terraform Cloud enables large enterprises on AWS to organize, govern, and distribute their Terraform Cloud configurations within AWS at scale. Customers can now use AWS Service Catalog as a single tool for managing Terraform Cloud configurations, with features such as cataloging of standardized and pre-approved configurations, infrastructure as code templates, access control, and versioning. This integration allows administrators to curate a portfolio of pre-approved Terraform configurations on AWS Service Catalog, making it easier for end users to deploy these configurations with a single action from the AWS interface.

Customizable project permissions and policy assignment for HashiCorp Terraform Cloud are designed to empower organizations to scale securely and quickly while maintaining security and compliance with more granular customization options. The updates allow administrators to tailor project-level permissions, in addition to predefined roles, to maintain the least-privilege approach and reduce risks. Customizable policy assignment enables organizations to assign policy sets at the project level, making self-service provisioning achievable without sacrificing protection offered by policy guardrails. With these new features, organizations can now tailor solutions based on their specific needs to scale confidently, without choosing between security and productivity.

A comprehensive monitoring and observability strategy for HashiCorp Vault simplifies finding answers to important questions, enabling quick identification, analysis, and resolution of issues. This involves architecting a well-rounded strategy with log analysis, telemetry analysis, and API/synthetic monitoring, focusing on infrastructure monitoring, understanding Vault service consumption, and utilizing log analysis tools like Prometheus-compatible `/v1/sys/metrics` API endpoint. Key metrics to observe include request load, token creation, expire numbers, in-flight requests, handle requests, and handle login requests, with alerts triggered for anomalous values or sudden spikes. Synthetic monitoring simulates user interactions to measure performance and detect issues, while dashboards should be designed to visualize data in an easily consumable format, focusing on the target user group and incorporating filters for different dimensions. Reporting provides insights into compliance, security, access patterns, performance, and Vault adoption, with organizations correlating key indicators with organizational constructs using a well-defined path structure, naming convention, and tagging standard.

To mature their use of HashiCorp Terraform modules for scale and a faster release cadence, organizations can adopt guiding principles that strike a balance between standardization and flexibility, apply the Pareto Principle to module design, and focus on creating golden paths with easily discoverable, high-quality user instructions. Cloud mature organizations prioritize cohesion, automation, and trust in their development process, using techniques like shifting left, codifying compliance checks, and empowering specialists to write Terraform code. By standardizing patterns and processes, organizations can supercharge application delivery, reduce manual processes, and increase the speed of deployment while maintaining security and compliance.

HashiCorp has won the 2023 Datadog Partner Network Integration Developer Partner of the Year Award for the second consecutive year, recognizing its work with Datadog's product and marketing teams to create integrated solutions for joint customers. The company was chosen based on revenue contribution, growth, product expansion, and commitment to innovation and customer support. HashiCorp collaborated with Datadog on several integrations, including HCP Boundary and HCP Packer, providing comprehensive visibility into infrastructure access. The company's Technology Partner Alliances Team expressed its gratitude for the award and looked forward to continuing its work with Datadog. Datadog also praised the companies recognized for their innovation and commitment to delivering value to customers.

Secure your infrastructure by bridging skills gaps, enabling standard workflows, and enforcing policy guardrails with Terraform. Organizations must address shortcomings in traditional provisioning processes, including inadequate security measures, to tackle emerging cloud security challenges. To achieve this, teams must adopt infrastructure as code (IaC) tools like HashiCorp Terraform, which codify infrastructure to make it versionable, scannable, and reusable. By building workflows with the needs of junior developers in mind and leveraging modules, users can preserve productivity while ensuring best practices are met across the entire infrastructure estate. Terraform provides unified provisioning for multi-cloud environments, reducing many workflows into a single golden provisioning workflow. The tool also offers credential management solutions, such as HashiCorp Vault, to ensure secure authentication to providers. Additionally, Terraform enables users to move security and compliance efforts upstream by enforcing guardrails during the provisioning process and automatically validating them against the code. By adopting these best practices, organizations can establish a secure infrastructure foundation that supports their cloud journey and incorporates zero-trust security principles.