June 2024 Summaries

The HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy Survey 2024 reveals that only 8% of organizations are highly mature in the cloud, with these trailblazers enjoying faster development speed, lower costs, and reduced risk. While many other organizations continue to struggle, creating a "haves" vs. "have nots" situation, generative AI could potentially boost cloud automation but also introduces another level of uncertainty. The survey highlights the critical role of platform teams in achieving cloud maturity, with highly mature organizations leading the way in using platform teams to maximize staff expertise and address skills shortages.

Terraform 1.9 has been released, offering enhancements to input variable validations, a new string templating function, and other improvements. The update allows for cross-object referencing in input variable validations, expanding the scenarios that can be validated. Additionally, a new built-in templatestring function enables dynamic template rendering without saving it to a local disk. Other improvements include refactoring null_resourcetype and allowing provisioners in removedblocks.

HCP Waypoint actions is now in public beta, enabling platform teams to expose Day 2+ operations and workflows to developers. The feature allows for seamless integration of golden patterns and workflows into applications at scale. Actions can be executed directly within the HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) by both platform engineers and developers. HCP Waypoint actions support custom HTTP API integrations, enabling a wide range of Day 2+ operations such as CI/CD operations, promotions, rollbacks, feature flag toggling, and more. Additionally, agents can be used to execute operations in private environments while maintaining network access policies. Key benefits include self-service for developers and auto-assigning prescribed workflows with applications.

HashiCorp has announced 17 new Terraform integrations with partners such as Cisco, Dell, Red Hat, and ServiceNow, expanding the capabilities of HCP Terraform, Terraform Enterprise, and Community Edition. These integrations enable users to automate and secure cloud infrastructure management more effectively. The HashiCorp Terraform ecosystem is designed for managing infrastructure across multiple clouds and on-premises environments using a single control plane with infrastructure as code. Among the new features are ServiceNow's ability to provision no-code workspaces through its Service Catalog, and support for deployment of Terraform Enterprise on Podman with Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and above.

Seven new HashiCorp Vault ecosystem integrations extend security use cases for customers. The latest integrations include HCP Vault Secrets with Coder, four new Vault Enterprise integrations with Cohesity, Collibra, Qualys, and Veritas, and two new HashiCorp Vault Community Edition integrations with Confluent and Postman. These partnerships enhance security features for various applications and platforms, allowing users to manage secrets more effectively and securely.

HashiCorp Consul 1.19 is now generally available, offering improvements in external service registration on Kubernetes, enhanced Nomad support, and additional features. The new Registration custom resource definition (CRD) simplifies the process of registering external services into the mesh, while allowing multi-location storage for Consul snapshots. Consul 1.19 also supports saving Consul snapshots to multiple destinations, improving recovery time objectives with higher availability. Furthermore, it improves Nomad support with integrations for the Consul API gateway, transparent proxy, and admin partitions.

HashiCorp Vault 1.17 introduces new features for secure workflows, improved performance, and enhanced secrets management scalability. Key additions include Workload Identity Federation (WIF) support to establish trust relationships between external systems and Vault's identity token provider, PKI secret engine enhancements with EST protocol support for hardware device management, and the ability to store custom metadata associated with certificate signing requests. Additionally, Vault Enterprise now offers high availability for its seal key storage, increased namespace and mount capacity, and instant updates for Kubernetes secrets.

HashiCorp has introduced granular permissions for managing agent pools in HCP Terraform and Terraform Enterprise, allowing organization owners to delegate this responsibility to individual teams. This improvement streamlines the management of agent pools and reduces security risks associated with granting full platform access to users who may not need it. The new manage agent pools permission enables approved team members to create, update, and delete agent pools without needing owner-level membership. This feature is now available in HCP Terraform and coming soon to Terraform Enterprise.

At AWS re:Inforce, HashiCorp will be sharing expert talks, product demos, and news announcements related to cloud security. The event will focus on the latest developments in HashiCorp's Security Lifecycle Management (SLM) portfolio, including new additions and improvements that help users protect sensitive infrastructure elements, inspect their security posture, and securely connect machines, users, and services. Key updates include a strategic collaboration agreement with AWS to create policy as code using Terraform, the introduction of Secrets Sync for HCP Vault Secrets and Vault Enterprise, and Workload Identity Federation (WIF) coming soon to Vault Enterprise in version 1.17. HashiCorp will also be discussing its Infrastructure Lifecycle Management (ILM) offerings from Terraform, Packer, Nomad, and Waypoint, as well as Security Lifecycle Management (SLM) offerings from Vault and Boundary.

HashiCorp has announced updates to its Security Lifecycle Management (SLM) products, HashiCorp Vault and Boundary, aimed at protecting sensitive data for organizations. The enhancements include Workload Identity Federation (WIF), secrets sync, Vault Secrets Operator (VSO), auto-rotation for HCP Vault Secrets, and support for the Enrollment over Secure Transport (EST) protocol in Vault PKI. Additionally, HashiCorp has expanded secret scanning support to include Confluence and JIRA with its HCP Vault Radar tool. These updates aim to provide a comprehensive solution for managing sensitive data across various platforms and applications.

HCP Waypoint, a platform designed to empower teams to define golden patterns and workflows for developers, is set to release its beta version soon. The new actions capability will enable organizations to define and execute golden workflows such as building an application, performing rollbacks, or executing operations in private environments. Alongside this, enhancements have been made to HCP Waypoint templates and add-ons, allowing platform teams more ways to customize these features while also introducing new ways to enable a seamless end-to-end self-serve experience for developers. These updates aim to simplify the management of application lifecycle operations across public clouds and private on-premises datacenters.

HashiCorp has announced new capabilities across its Infrastructure Lifecycle Management (ILM) portfolio, including HashiCorp Terraform, Packer, Nomad, and Waypoint, to help customers build, deploy, and manage infrastructure. The latest offerings aim to address challenges in each stage of the infrastructure lifecycle - Day 0 (build), Day 1 (deploy), and Day 2+ (manage). Key features include enhanced agent capabilities for private VCS access and policy enforcement, support for Consul's integration with Nomad as a first-class runtime alongside Kubernetes, and new actions in HCP Waypoint to enable Day 2 operations.