Navigating the Challenges of Hybrid Cloud Infrastructure: HashiCorp’s Latest Innovations
In today’s rapidly evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly adopting hybrid cloud environments to leverage the benefits of both public and private cloud infrastructures. However, this shift presents its own set of challenges, particularly in terms of security. Many organizations find themselves grappling with security risks due to misconfigurations and inadequate protective measures throughout the lifecycle of their cloud infrastructure. Recognizing these hurdles, HashiCorp has introduced its Infrastructure Lifecycle Management (ILM) portfolio, designed to automate the development, deployment, and management of infrastructure, ensuring a streamlined, secure, and compliant approach.
As companies expand their IT operations, the importance of infrastructure automation becomes more pronounced. This growth brings with it the challenge of maintaining a balance between developer agility and the organization’s security and compliance needs. Infrastructure lifecycle management (ILM) emerges as a crucial solution, enabling developers to adopt secure and cost-effective methods without compromising on speed.
At the recent HashiDays event in London, HashiCorp unveiled several new features aimed at simplifying infrastructure lifecycle management and enhancing value delivery:
Key Features Unveiled at HashiDays London
1. HashiCorp Terraform Ephemeral Resources: This feature is designed to safeguard sensitive information, such as passwords or API keys, ensuring they do not persist in state files unnecessarily.
2. Pre-written Sentinel Policies: By introducing a library of pre-written policies co-developed with AWS, HashiCorp aims to lower the barriers to adopting policy-as-code infrastructure workflows, making it easier for organizations to enforce governance.
3. Private VCS Access: This feature allows secure access to private version control system (VCS) repositories, ensuring that source code and static credentials remain safe from exposure over the public internet.
4. Module Lifecycle Management – Revocation: This capability simplifies module management by allowing the revocation of outdated or vulnerable modules, thus maintaining compliance and security.
5. HCP Waypoint Actions: Platform teams can now enable developers to safely perform Day 2+ operations such as restarts, rollbacks, and build promotions through a user-friendly interface, command-line interface (CLI), or API.
6. HashiCorp Nomad 1.10 – Dynamic Host Volumes: This feature facilitates on-demand provisioning of host storage, enhancing operational efficiency and governance compared to previous options.
Terraform Ephemeral Values
Terraform’s recent update introduces ephemeral resources, ephemeral input variables, and write-only arguments to enhance resource management’s efficiency and security. Ephemeral resources, which are temporary and managed within a single Terraform operation, help minimize long-term costs by promptly deleting unused resources. This feature optimizes resource usage due to their short-lived nature.
Write-only arguments, on the other hand, are data elements that are securely stored in Terraform’s state file and can only be altered in a write-only manner. This is crucial for safeguarding sensitive data and preventing unintended exposure or inclusion in version control systems.
Sentinel Policies: Simplifying Governance
Sentinel, HashiCorp’s policy-as-code framework, offers logic-based policy enforcement for infrastructure configurations in Terraform. This allows organizations to treat policies like application code, enabling version control, audits, tests, and cross-stakeholder understanding.
To ease the adoption of policy-as-code workflows, particularly for organizations lacking resources or expertise, HashiCorp has introduced pre-written Sentinel policy sets in collaboration with AWS. Available in the Terraform registry, these libraries offer turnkey solutions for complex governance challenges, empowering organizations to move quickly without sacrificing security. The policies are co-created with AWS and comply with industry standards such as the Center for Internet Security (CIS) and Amazon Foundational Best Security Practices (FSBP).
Enhancing Security with Private VCS Access
Large enterprises, due to their size, face heightened data security risks and require more stringent security controls when utilizing SaaS or managed services. Many prefer to keep Terraform operations, like VCS management, off the public internet. With Private VCS Access now available in HCP Terraform Premium, organizations can utilize egress-only connections to HCP Terraform, ensuring their on-premises agent remains inaccessible from the internet. This move significantly reduces potential attack surfaces and bolsters organizational security.
Module Lifecycle Management – Revocation
Modules are essential for accelerating infrastructure provisioning and are widely developed, shared, and used across multiple teams. The HCP Terraform private registry offers a centralized workflow for module publishing and discovery. However, without a reliable way to revoke outdated modules, organizations risk using obsolete or non-compliant configurations.
The latest module lifecycle management feature, revocation, now part of HCP Terraform Premium, ensures that only up-to-date and compliant module versions are in use. Deprecated modules will be flagged with warnings, but revocation takes it a step further by blocking runs that include revoked modules. This prevents users from deploying resources with outdated or vulnerable module versions, offering custom messages for guidance, thus enhancing developer efficiency while mitigating security risks.
Empowering Developers with HCP Waypoint Actions
Initially introduced in public beta at last year’s HashiDays London, HCP Waypoint actions are now generally available with HCP Terraform Premium. These actions allow platform teams to create “golden workflows” for Day 2+ operations like restarts and rollbacks, which developers can trigger safely via the HCP UI, CLI, or API. By tying these actions to Waypoint templates, applications inherit consistent, safe operational practices, replacing inconsistent scripts and manual processes with standardized, self-service tasks.
Nomad Dynamic Host Volumes: A Leap in Storage Management
HashiCorp Nomad 1.10 introduces dynamic host volumes, significantly improving storage management by allowing on-demand volume creation directly through the API or CLI. This eliminates the need for pre-configuration and client restarts, adding agility and self-service capabilities for operators. The feature enables custom storage provisioning precisely when needed, simplifying workflows for deploying stateful applications and reducing administrative overhead. Nomad Enterprise further enhances this with governance features, allowing operators to enforce specific rules on a volume’s specifications with Sentinel policies.
Conclusion: A New Era in Infrastructure Lifecycle Management
These new developments from HashiCorp mark a significant leap forward in simplifying Infrastructure Lifecycle Management. From securing infrastructure pre-deployment to streamlining Day 2+ operations at scale, these features reflect HashiCorp’s commitment to helping organizations navigate the complexities of cloud infrastructure effectively.
For those new to HashiCorp’s ILM offerings, getting started is straightforward. By signing up for an HCP account, users can explore many of these new features and benefit from a $500 credit included with HCP Terraform plans, including the Premium version. This allows users to quickly experience all the available features. For organizations interested in self-managed solutions, HashiCorp also offers options for Terraform and Nomad.
These advancements underscore the importance of adopting a comprehensive approach to infrastructure management, ensuring secure, agile, and compliant cloud operations that can scale with organizational growth.
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