HashiConf '24 - The WWT'ers Prospective

For the first time in its decade-long history, HashiConf was hosted on the East Coast in Boston. The conference wasn't short on valuable knowledge, with a two-day agenda that mirrored Hashi's reimagined portfolio.

Day 1 - ILM: Build, deploy and manage infrastructure at scale

Day 1 was all about updates to the Infrastructure Lifecycle Management (ILM) portfolio. Notable new functionality included the following:

• Packer: Better integrations with GitHub and GitLab enable the tracking of CI/CD information in build pipelines.
• Nomad: Now able to schedule workloads on NVIDIA Multi-Instance GPUs, including the ability to partition GPUs across multiple users.
• Waypoint: A product designed to create an Internal Development Platform (IDP) and provide self-service infrastructure to developers, including the ability to template the provisioning of that infrastructure.

But the major highlights for us from Day 1 were the updates to HCP Terraform. HCP Terraform Stacks, now available in public beta, addresses common challenges that we see organizations face when scaling their Terraform deployments.

Terraform Stacks

Challenge

As Terraform environments grow, teams struggle with managing large states, controlling blast radius, and handling resources with disparate lifecycles. While workspaces help create boundaries between environments, they don't fully solve the challenge of managing interdependent resources across privilege boundaries or across multiple environments like Development, Test, and Production.

Solution

Terraform Stacks introduces two key constructs:

• Components: These leverage your existing modules and enable you to establish a hierarchy of resources in a Stack that shares common lifecycles, with inputs, outputs, and providers for each component.
• Deployments: Enable easy deployment of infrastructure in the Stack across multiple environments with different settings.

This approach lets teams maintain consistency across environments while keeping resource management simple and secure.

Additionally, updates to Module Lifecycle Management go hand-in-hand with Stacks, ensuring improved management of these environments.

Module lifecycle management improves infrastructure lifecycle

In keeping with the overall ILM theme of "Making Infrastructure Deployment at Scale Easier" design improvements to the module lifecycle enable better management and visibility. It's always been easy to publish and consume modules from the private registry, but dealing with the end of a module's lifecycle was a "miss" at scale.

Challenge

Without a framework or formal process in place, deprecating old module versions was difficult without breaking environments currently using that particular version. Controlling the distribution of those old versions was also challenging, as there was little visibility into where old module versions were being used and what they were being used for. 

Solution

• Deprecating a module version in the Private Registry now shows warnings to users in the UI during a plan or run.
• The explorer view in HCP Terraform has been enhanced, making it easy to find workspaces that are outside of the current guidelines.
• For those workspaces that need attention, Change Requests can be made via the explorer to build a backlog of action items needed to bring them back into compliance.
• Team Notifications have been enhanced to make sure that the right messages get sent to the right teams.
• Saved Views in the Explorer can be used as a compliance dashboard to isolate and track problems in workspaces.

This is a great segue into Day 2, where we found compliance and risk management to be a significant area of focus for our customers. So, we'll do a deeper dive next.

Day 2 - SLM: Governance, risk & compliance in the clouds 

Day 2 focused on updates to the Security Lifecycle Management (SLM) portfolio, allowing an organization to enhance its security posture through comprehensive updates. These updates strengthened secret management (Vault), service networking (Consul) and access control (Boundary) capabilities to ensure robust end-to-end security across the infrastructure.

Shift-left is not-so-boring of an adventure

Imagine a place where technology design and compliance come together in perfect harmony, where "secure lifecycle management" is the hottest buzzword, and where HashiCorp tools are the superheroes everyone's talking about. Welcome to HashiConf '24, folks! Where Secure Lifecycle Management offerings help organizations manage infrastructure at scale.

I'd be remised to cite this defense cyber security reference. Before adopting any new technologies, organizations must train their teams and establish their corporate governance, risk management, and compliance as part of the culture for all areas. This is the key to making better decisions, mitigating threats, achieving company objectives, and aligning the company with its strategy to centralize critical data, have convergence, transparency, internal control, audit and investigation.

Transforming security and compliance in the multicloud era

The message at HashiConf '24 was crystal clear: as organizations navigate the complexities of modern infrastructure, security, and compliance aren't just checkboxes—they're competitive advantages. This year's conference spotlighted how enterprises are tackling their biggest challenges: maintaining ironclad control over data, ensuring compliance across distributed systems and managing security in multiple environments.

The evolution of data control starts with modernizing infrastructure

Challenge

The opening keynote struck a chord with me. It addressed the elephant in the room: organizations are struggling to balance innovation with managing data and security when developing application workloads to live anywhere. While the cloud promises agility and scalability, businesses aren't ready to relinquish control of their sensitive data.

Solution

An automated hybrid approach that maintains on-premise security while strategically leveraging cloud capabilities. An agnostic application infrastructure leveraging an automated ephemeral compute, storage, and networked environment based on Kubernetes architectures. See this example: Terraform Stacks deploying a Kubernetes cluster with deferred actions

Key Takeaways when adopting the model:

1. Organizations are prioritizing on-premise security for sensitive workloads
2. Multicloud architectures are emerging as the preferred approach
3. Data sovereignty and control remain top priorities for enterprise leadership

Secure lifecycle management: Shift left is a game changer

Perhaps the most significant announcement at HashiConf '24 was the emergence of "secure lifecycle management" as a cornerstone of modern infrastructure. This approach isn't just about securing applications – it's about embedding security and compliance into every stage of the development process compartmentalizing and enabling developers with Infrastructure as Code (IaC).

An honorable mention is the more granular level RBAC with Packer, which helps define user access at the bucket level allowing developers to create buckets within the same project while being walled off from full-project access that is not relevant to their outcome.

The conference showcased measurable results from several organizations that have successfully implemented secure lifecycle management across their multi-cloud environments:

• A major financial institution reduced security incidents by 60 percent
• A healthcare provider cut compliance verification time by 75 percent
• A government agency successfully automated 90 percent of its security controls

HashiCorp's answer to regulatory challenges

The spotlight sessions on Consul and Vault demonstrated how HashiCorp's tools are evolving to meet complex regulatory requirements. For gRPC teams dealing with government and risk compliance, these sessions were particularly enlightening:

Consul's role:

• Service mesh security across multiple clouds to provide visibility to correlate for better decision
• Automated compliance verification enables auditor confidence
• Real-time policy enforcement providing event-driven response
• Secure service-to-service communication across environments based on the business objective

Vault's impact:

• Centralized secrets management to provide a unified source of truth for passwords, API keys and certificates
• On-demand Dynamic Credential Generation that can be rotated automatically
• Encryption as a service centralizing key management and providing automated access controls through policy

Vault Radar impact:

Through various sessions at the conference, emphasis was also placed on Vault Radar, a solution that automates the detection of unmanaged secrets within a variety of data sources you can connect to. This also ties into the regulatory aspect discussed below as Vault Radar can also scan for personally identifiable information (PII). Including this powerful capability into your own secure lifecycle management strategy makes the job of security teams easier and further reduces the risks posed by hard-coded sensitive information and credentials.

Wrapping up: The road ahead

Day 1 - ILM - Infrastructure should be ephemeral, but your process must be eternal

The results were clear in response to the challenges presented. Some measurable ones that really came to focus for me:

Breaking down operational silos

A recurring theme throughout the conference was the challenge of operational variance. When different teams follow different processes, security and compliance suffer. HashiConf 2024 presented several solutions resulting in convergence to a more unified strategy when automating infrastructure

Standardization through automation:

• Unified deployment workflows
• Consistent security policies
• Automated compliance checking
• Standardized infrastructure as code

Cross-team collaboration:

• Shared responsibility models
• Integrated security and development workflows
• Unified monitoring and alerting
• Standardized incident response

ROI of early compliance investment

One of the most compelling sessions focused on the financial benefits of investing in compliance during the development phase. Organizations shared impressive metrics:

• 40 percent reduction in audit preparation time
• 65 percent decrease in compliance-related labor costs
• 50 percent fewer security-related development delays
• 70 percent faster regulatory approval processes

Day 2: SLM - Security as an enabler

The key message from HashiConf '24 was transformative: when done right, security and compliance become enablers of innovation rather than barriers. By investing in the right tools, processes and approaches, organizations can achieve both ironclad security and operational agility.

The path forward is clear: embed security and compliance into development, standardize operations through automation, and leverage tools like Consul and Vault to manage complexity. As we move forward in this multi-cloud era, these principles will separate the leaders from the followers in digital transformation. 

Conclusion

As we look to Hashicorp's future, it's clear that the company is committed to the continuous development of its products. However, there's still room for growth and integration within the broader automation landscape. IBM's acquisition of Hashicorp is expected to be completed by the end of the year, and we look forward to hearing about the potential of integration with other automation toolsets under IBM's umbrella.

Nevertheless, with the rise of platform engineering and powerful features like Terraform Cloud Stacks, it's an exciting time to be in the world of infrastructure as code. Here's hoping that future developments will bring us closer to that holistic, integrated automation utopia we're all dreaming of!

What are your thoughts on Hashicorp's direction? Did you attend HashiConf, and if so, what were your key takeaways? Let's continue this conversation in the comments below! 💬

Remember, in the world of infrastructure, the only constant is change – so stay curious, keep learning and happy terraforming! 🚀