February 2025 Summaries

HashiCorp has officially joined the IBM family, accelerating its mission of enabling multi-cloud. The company was founded over a decade ago by Mitchell Hashimoto and Plushcap (the author) with a strong conviction about the trajectory of cloud computing, which has proven correct. HashiCorp has been a pioneer in defining modern cloud infrastructure paradigms, with products like Terraform, Vault, and Vagrant. The company is passionate about building products to solve real-world problems and has a wide portfolio of tools used by hundreds of thousands of organizations. With IBM's global scale and increased R&D resources, HashiCorp aims to reach more customers and continue to invest in solving infrastructure and security challenges.

The HCP Terraform Operator is now certified on Red Hat OpenShift, allowing users to manage HCP Terraform workspaces directly from their Kubernetes clusters. The operator offers improved agent scaling capabilities, enabling teams to better manage resource use and respond efficiently to workload demands. Enhanced control over workspace deletion has also been introduced, ensuring resources are preserved by default and reducing the risk of accidental deletions. The certification marks a significant milestone in the operator's commitment to providing reliable, scalable, and secure integrations between Terraform and Kubernetes for streamlined workflows across hybrid and multi-cloud environments.

HashiCorp has released new features in its HCP Terraform platform to simplify infrastructure management. Module lifecycle management is now generally available, allowing teams to manage module versioning and reduce security risks. Linked Stacks have been introduced to simplify cross-Stack dependency management, making it easier to share outputs between Stacks. Enhanced tags provide better organization and control over workspace tagging at scale, with features such as reserved tags that are not overwritable and project-owned variable sets for more flexible control. These new features aim to improve the overall infrastructure management experience in HCP Terraform.

The text discusses patterns for refactoring infrastructure as code to comply with organizational standards. It highlights the importance of standardizing applications, infrastructure, and security to streamline compliance and remediation at scale. The article introduces policy as code and immutability as key concepts to support refactoring efforts. Policy as code automates, documents, and versions policies, while immutability reduces complexity, minimizes disruption, and scales for larger use cases. By adopting policy as code and immutability, organizations can speed up discovery and remediation, reduce risk fragmentation, and improve the efficiency of standardizing platforms and resources. The article provides examples and guidance on implementing policy as code, using immutability in migrations, and applying these concepts to refactoring across multiple platforms.

Terraform has introduced project-owned variable sets to provide more flexible controls over access and usage, simplifying management, reducing dependencies, and allowing for granular permissions. This feature addresses the need for more control within projects while ensuring consistency and security across multiple workspaces. With project-owned variable sets, users can define variables once and reuse them across multiple workspaces within a specific project, eliminating the need for manual duplication of sensitive data or reliance on platform teams for variable set management. The new feature offers benefits such as facilitating the transition to projects, simplifying variable set management, granular control over variable sets, and increased operational efficiency, ultimately empowering project teams with the control they need to manage their infrastructure efficiently while maintaining a high level of security and governance.

The HashiCorp platform team automates their HCP Terraform workspace setup and onboarding process using a custom module, the TFE provider, and good requirements gathering. They create an onboarding module that generates workspaces for a new application team with reusable code, documentation, and automated tests. The module uses variables to capture team-specific requirements, including environment names, admin teams, user teams, and application IDs. It also includes validation rules to ensure the environment landscape is correct. The platform team reviews their objectives, including getting the team up and running quickly and creating a reusable onboarding pattern. They ask questions about the team's environment landscape, permissions, and workspace naming conventions. After gathering requirements, they create a Terraform module with input variables for environment names, admin teams, user teams, and application IDs. The module generates workspaces based on these inputs and includes outputs for workspace IDs, admin team IDs, and user team IDs. The platform team also writes automated tests to validate the environment landscape and workspace name formatting. They publish their module in a private registry and provide documentation and examples for users. Potential enhancements include introducing HCP Terraform projects, configuring workspace notifications, using dynamic provider credentials, and implementing module lifecycle management.

HashiCorp has announced its 2025 Principle Awards, recognizing teams that embody the company's nine core principles through their cross-functional teamwork. The winning team, led by Strategic security & compliance uplift for enterprise products, demonstrated integrity and pragmatism in addressing security challenges while prioritizing communication to ensure customer trust. Another finalist, HashiCorp Validated Designs and Assets That Matter, showcased a successful initiative that made technical resources easier for customer-facing teams to find and use, resulting in significant improvements to productivity costs. The company also recognized its improved launch lifecycle process, which enhanced transparency and efficiency during major product announcements and launches.

HashiCorp has released Boundary 0.19, which extends dynamic host discovery to Google Cloud Platform and simplifies worker filter configuration in the admin UI. The new release adds support for automatic host auto-discovery for GCP, making it easier for administrators to configure worker filters without manually updating catalogs. This feature reduces the burden on administrators by removing the task of managing agents or manually updating catalogs. Additionally, the latest 0.19 release improves worker filter configuration by providing a worker filter generator that simplifies the configuration process in the admin UI, reducing administrative time and the potential for human error. Boundary 0.19 is generally available today for HCP Standard, HCP Plus, Boundary Enterprise, and Boundary Community Edition users.

The ServiceNow plugins for Terraform are being updated with new enhancements that implement no-code execution mode, key-value tags, and increased encryption security. The updates include the release of version 2.8 of the ServiceNow Service Catalog for Terraform, which allows users to specify an execution mode when provisioning infrastructure using no-code workspaces, and version 1.2 of the Service Graph Connector for Terraform, which introduces a critical security update that switches to more advanced encryption standards, providing a secure connection between HCP Terraform and ServiceNow. The new features enable admins to choose the right execution environment based on their specific needs and infrastructure constraints, provide an optimized workflow for provisioning no-code workspaces, offer more granular and meaningful categorization of workspaces, and enhance the security of importing Terraform resources into the ServiceNow CMDB.

The growing demand for cloud computing resources has led to significant waste in terms of unnecessary or unused cloud expenditures. This is often due to the "lift and shift" approach, where large, legacy applications are moved directly to the cloud without a strategic re-think, resulting in costly inefficiencies. To reduce cloud waste, three steps can be taken: first, rethink apps from CapEx to OpEx, which involves modernizing legacy workloads and taking advantage of the rental model of the cloud; second, put guardrails in place to automate and optimize cloud resource management using infrastructure as code; and third, tightly couple cloud spending with business results by incorporating technology, finance, and business together to drive operational processes based on financial impact. By implementing these steps, organizations can achieve leaner spending that is more tightly integrated with the business.