DEVOPSdigest

HashiCorp announced updates across its multi-cloud infrastructure automation suite. The product announcements span Consul, Terraform, Vault, and Nomad and cover both open source and commercial capabilities.

“The reality for the vast majority of the Global 2000 is and likely always will be ‘multi-cloud,’” said Dave McJannet, CEO of HashiCorp. “We continue to invest deeply across our product suite so that our users can adopt the infrastructure of their choice while maintaining a consistent set of workflows for operations, security, networking, and development professionals. This current cohort of very significant product releases represents our ongoing commitment as an enabler of this multi-cloud transition.”

Highlights include:

HashiCorp Consul

Advanced service mesh capabilities, with multi-data center support for service segmentation in HashiCorp Consul. HashiCorp is releasing HashiCorp Consul 1.4 this week, which includes the General Availability (GA) of Consul Connect, a major service mesh feature to enable secure communication between services. In June, HashiCorp released native integration with Kubernetes to automate secure service communication across clusters and across runtime platforms. HashiCorp also delivered native integration with Envoy, one of the most widely adopted proxies for service mesh solutions. Services inside and outside Kubernetes can now be automatically configured to securely connect via a built-in or Envoy proxy. Multi-data center support enables federation of trust and sharing of security policies between different clouds and on-premises data centers.

“HashiCorp Consul enables enterprises to replace large numbers of traditional east-west load balancers and firewalls with a distributed service mesh across their global deployments,” said Mitchell Hashimoto, founder and CTO of HashiCorp. “Consul is critical for ensuring you know the location and status of services in dynamic environments and can securely connect to them, while drastically reducing costs at the same time.”

“A guiding principle for my teams at Microsoft is to develop open source software that meets our customers where they are and enables them to find success on Azure,” said Brendan Burns, distinguished engineer at Microsoft. “Over the last year, I’ve been thrilled to see us collaborate with HashiCorp on integrating HashiCorp Terraform and Azure. Now I’m even more excited to see us broaden that collaboration to tools like HashiCorp Packer and HashiCorp Consul. For our enterprise customers beginning their digital transformation to Azure, an important problem is integrating traditional and cloud native technologies. Tools like Packer and Consul are a great bridge to enable customers to successfully deploy hybrid solutions to their real-world enterprise applications both on-premises and in Azure.”

HashiCorp Terraform

Improved configuration language, remote operations, and a new free collaboration feature for HashiCorp Terraform.

- HashiCorp announces Terraform 0.12, with major updates and improvements to its HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL), used to describe provisioning configuration, and one of the fastest growing programming languages of 2018 in terms of contributors, according to GitHub’s new Octoverse report.

- New “Remote” Plan and Apply capabilities, enabling a user to preserve the workflow experience of the Command Line Interface (CLI) while delegating execution to Terraform Enterprise where policy and governance can be enforced centrally.

- A new free tier of service that adds collaboration workflow capabilities for Terraform. HashiCorp will provide free remote state management for all Terraform users with encryption provided by Vault, per-operation locking, and no limits on users or workspaces.

“HashiCorp Terraform is a core part of the way organizations set up and manage their cloud and on-premises infrastructure, and we are iterating on the product aggressively,” said Armon Dadgar, founder and CTO of HashiCorp. “We’ve made the configuration language simpler and more flexible, tightly integrated Terraform Enterprise for centralized governance, and most importantly made critical collaboration features free to everyone.”

HashiCorp Vault

Version 1.0 of HashiCorp Vault. Vault leverages identity to enable secrets management and encryption with capabilities that scale to the needs of large enterprises. The Vault 1.0 release focuses on enterprise stability, ecosystem integration, and scale. Vault 1.0 also makes the auto unseal capability formerly part of Vault Enterprise available in open source. This allows users to more easily automate the provisioning and lifecycle of Vault without a manual unseal process. Vault will support auto unseal on Alibaba Cloud, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure.

“HashiCorp Vault is the fourth HashiCorp product to reach our very rigorous 1.0 milestone, following HashiCorp Packer, Consul, and Vagrant,” said Mitchell Hashimoto, founder and CTO of HashiCorp. “Since the first release of Vault in 2015, it has grown from a central place to keep secrets to a comprehensive secrets management and data protection platform for some of the largest organizations in the world.”

“We're excited to continue our partnership with HashiCorp by delivering technical integrations designed to enable DevOps practitioners to be successful on Google Cloud,” said Seth Vargo, developer advocate at Google Cloud. “We are committed to making our enterprise customers successful on Google Cloud whether they are building custom Virtual Machines with Packer, provisioning infrastructure with Terraform, or managing secrets with Vault.”

HashiCorp Nomad

HashiCorp Nomad 0.9 coming in November 2018. HashiCorp Nomad provides a consistent workflow to deploy any application across any infrastructure. HashiCorp announced that Nomad 0.9 adds advanced scheduling capabilities, adds NVIDIA GPU support, lays the groundwork for plugin-based integrations, adds Web UI support for job submission, and improves resource statistic visualizations. The 0.9 release will add a plugin system to enable the community to easily contribute and maintain new task drivers.

“The new features that we’re adding to HashiCorp Nomad will simplify ecosystem integrations and expand use cases, particularly in GPU-based machine learning and batch processing environments,” said Armon Dadgar, founder and CTO of HashiCorp. “Some of the largest companies in the world rely on Nomad across their diverse multi-cloud and on-premises environments.”

Consul 1.4 and Consul Enterprise 1.4 are currently in preview and will be generally available this week.

The preview of Terraform 0.12 is available starting today. The free Terraform collaboration functionality will begin beta later this year. Those who sign up for the waitlist will be notified when this and other collaboration functionality become available.

The preview of Vault 1.0 is available starting today. Vault 1.0 will be generally available in November 2018.

The preview of Nomad 0.9 is coming soon and the release will be generally available in November.