At its annual HashiConf conference this week in San Francisco, HashiCorp provided a wide-ranging update on new features and capabilities across its portfolio of security and infrastructure products.
HashiCorp develops a number of services that it offers on its HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP), including the widely used Terraform infrastructure-as-code (IaC) technology, Vault for security secrets management, and Consul for application service delivery.
At HashiConf, the company introduced a number of new capabilities that span its portfolio of services. For infrastructure, HashiCorp released new capabilities in Terraform for infrastructure as code provisioning and management. This includes AI-generated tests in Terraform Cloud and Terraform Stacks for multicluster deployments. For security, HashiCorp announced updates for Vault and Consul products to provide identity-based controls for secrets management, secure remote access, and service networking.
In addition to AI-generated tests for HashiCorp Terraform Cloud, key improvements include several new features: HCP Vault Radar, HCP Vault Secrets, HCP Consul Central, and HCP Waypoint templates. These enhancements are crafted to standardize the interface between developers and the cloud, reduce manual tasks via automation and AI, and empower developers with the necessary workflow integrations to deploy applications quickly and securely.
"We think about the role of platform teams, and how we provide that set of shared infrastructure lifecycle management for provisioning, deploying, managing the lifecycle of an application," Armon Dadgar, co-founder and CTO of HashiCorp, said during his HashiConf keynote. "At the same time, there's the set of security challenges: How do we distribute secrets and keys, broker access between people, machines, and different services?"
HashiCorp Vault Updates Boost Security
Among the updates to HashiCorp's security portfolio is the general availability release of Vault Secrets, the company's secret management service on HashiCorp Cloud Platform.
Dadgar noted that a new feature in Vault is the ability to provide advanced data protection capabilities, which allow Vault to encrypt data at rest and in transit for applications. This includes features such as data tokenization.
During his keynote, Dadgar also announced Vault Radar. Vault Radar lets users scan their infrastructure and find secrets that may be exposed. It integrates secret detection with management. HashiCorp got the technology behind Vault Radar via the acquisition of BluBracket in June.
Terraform Updates Scale Infrastructure as Code Deployments
Dadgar also used his keynote to go through a long list of updates to his company's Terraform platform.
Among the updates is AI-powered auto-generation of module tests, which can build an initial set of tests to save time, with the ability for developers to further refine the tests. Dadgar also introduced new ephemeral workspaces for Terraform to automatically enable users to create new workspaces for development environments.
The biggest update, however, that Dadgar talked about is a preview for the new Terraform Stacks features.
"This is the biggest enhancement to the Terraform orchestration engine since Terraform was released," Dadgar said. "What this lets us do is have a single configuration that spans multiple configs that could be the underlying network config, Kubernetes apps, and multiple environments for dev, test, and production and capture all of that as a single stack."
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Sean Michael Kerner is an IT consultant, technology enthusiast and tinkerer. He consults to industry and media organizations on technology issues.
