March 2024 Summaries

As Women's History Month comes to an end, we are spotlighting empowering stories from women in the HashiCorp community who share their journeys and achievements working in tech. These women offer advice for other women looking to excel in technology, such as asking questions, seeking feedback, embracing continuous learning, and finding mentors. They also discuss challenges they have faced in their careers and how they overcame them, including maintaining work-life balance and dealing with negative experiences due to being a woman in tech. Some of the women who have inspired or influenced these technologists' career paths include Julie Seo, Sarah Polan, Louise Fellows, Heather Potter, Meghan Liese, Tanya Helin, Carol Swartz, and Deborah Carter.

Mario Rodríguez Hernández, a technologist from the Canary Islands with over 20 years of experience in IT, shares his journey to refresh his career as a practitioner after being a CTO at a small firm. He achieved certifications in Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, HashiCorp Terraform, Kubernetes, and many other technologies. Mario's certification in Terraform played a significant role in his transition back to a more technical role. The certification helped him stand out from others and open doors for new job opportunities. He is now working as a senior specialist in architecture and DevOps at Minsait, focusing on utility companies and electric companies worldwide. Mario plans to continue expanding his certifications with HashiCorp Vault and Consul in the future.

HCP Vault Radar, HashiCorp's new secret scanning and discovery product, is now prepared for production workloads as it enters limited availability. The tool helps DevOps and security teams reduce the risk associated with secret sprawl by detecting unmanaged and leaked secrets in popular developer tools and repositories. HCP Vault Radar prioritizes remediation efforts based on factors such as whether a secret was discovered in the latest version of a file, its historical usage, and its presence in Vault's key value stores. The product supports secret scanning from both SaaS and agent-based variants, integrating results into a streamlined HCP dashboard for prioritization and remediation workflows. Additionally, it includes a CLI for on-demand use cases and integrates with ticketing and alerting solutions to prevent secrets from being merged into the main branch in GitHub pull requests.

HashiCorp has released version 2.3 of the Terraform Cloud Operator for Kubernetes, which allows users to initiate workspace runs declaratively. This update enhances self-service capabilities by enabling developers to start plan, apply, and refresh runs on workspaces managed by the Operator. The Workspace custom resource now supports three new annotations to initiate workspace runs: run-new, run-type, and run-terraform-version. These enhancements empower users to seamlessly expand their use of essential third-party integrations and connect, secure, and provision infrastructure with AWS.

HashiCorp Terraform Cloud has introduced new enhancements to its run task feature, enabling seamless integration with essential third-party tools for automation, configuration management, security, compliance, and orchestration tasks. The latest improvements focus on refining the process of associating run tasks within organizations and introducing a new post-apply stage, broadening potential use cases. Additionally, HashiCorp has introduced scopes to organizational run tasks in Terraform Cloud, allowing platform teams to define their scope and target them globally for consistency across workspaces. The advancements aim to streamline infrastructure provisioning and management, offering more ways to connect, secure, and provision infrastructure with AWS.

Packer 1.11 introduces a predictable plugin loading approach, only loading binaries from its plugin directory with accompanying SHA256SUM files. This change simplifies the plugin loading process and ensures Packer will load the correct binary at runtime. The new plugin loading experience is available in the alpha release of HashiCorp Packer 1.11.

Migrating from HashiCorp Consul service discovery to a service mesh can enhance security, observability, and availability without requiring modifications from development teams. The benefits include enforcing zero trust security principles using mTLS on all east/west traffic, providing distributed tracing and data plane metrics for better decision-making, and improving application availability through automatic handling of retries, rate limiting, circuit breaking, and timeouts. To transition smoothly, follow a three-step approach: enable permissive Mutual TLS Mode to support both HTTP and mTLS connections; enforce strict mutual TLS mode to secure all traffic with encryption; and adopt virtual services for advanced Layer 7 traffic management features.

HashiCorp has released Consul 1.18, a significant update to their service networking solution designed to help users discover and securely connect any application across any cloud or runtime. The new version introduces Long-Term Support (LTS) release program for self-managed Consul Enterprise, starting with versions 1.15 and 1.18. This program designates the first major release of each calendar year as an LTS release, which will receive critical fixes and security patches for two years. Additionally, Consul 1.18 includes fault-injection capabilities to aid in enhancing system resilience in microservice architectures. The update also expands Amazon ECS support for multi-runtime deployments, improving the maturity of its runtime adaptation.

HashiCorp has introduced Long-Term Support (LTS) releases for Consul Enterprise, starting with versions 1.15 and 1.18. These LTS releases aim to reduce operational overhead and risk by extending maintenance and upgrade compatibility. The first major release of each calendar year will be an LTS release. This program is designed to help organizations balance the costs of action versus inaction when upgrading mission-critical software like Consul Enterprise. With Consul Enterprise LTS releases, organizations can receive critical fixes without having to upgrade their major version more than once a year.