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Terraform, an open-source software solution for automating infrastructure provisioning, is getting more room to play on Microsoft’s cloud.
HashiCorp, makers of the DevOps-enabling “infrastructure-as-code” Terraform software, and Microsoft announced that they were building on their existing partnership to extend support for the technology to more Azure cloud services. In 2016, the companies announced support for Terraform as well as Packer, HashiCorp’s code-packaging solution, in Azure Resource Manager (ARM). ARM is a service that allows users to deploy and manage cloud resources as a group using templates.
Now the companies are pledging to drastically increase the number of Azure services that can be provisioned with Terraform. They include Azure Container Instances, Managed Disks and Virtual Machine Scale Sets, among others, explained Corey Sanders, director of compute at Microsoft Azure, in an Aug. 17 announcement.
For Dave McJannet, CEO of HashiCorp, the expansion not only builds on strong momentum for his company’s product, but is also a reflection of how quickly the Azure cloud ecosystem is growing.
“We have many customers that utilize Terraform as their primary mechanism for infrastructure provisioning on Azure, since Terraform currently supports the most popular services available on Azure today,” McJannet told eWEEK in email remarks.
“But Microsoft continues to innovate aggressively in their offering and so that list of available Azure services is constantly growing—today numbering more than 100-plus services across storage, compute, networking or data services for example. Through this collaboration we are committing to work together to build out much broader resource coverage with Terraform.”
The companies also expect the alliance to further dissolve the barriers that are keeping organizations from fully embracing the cloud.
“A key element of our company mission is to address the big technical challenges of cloud adoption, and for many of our customers, Azure is an important element of their cloud strategy,” continued McJannet. “A commitment to first-class Terraform support for the cloud providers that our customers rely upon is critical to reducing a key barrier to cloud adoption: the discrepancies in infrastructure provisioning approaches offered by each cloud provider.”
Azure support aside, HashiCorp has been busy on other fronts.
Earlier this month, the company released new open-source and Enterprise editions of Vault, a secrets management platform. Vault 0.8 expands on the multi-data center replication functionality that first debuted in the 0.7 release in March. Contrasting with the “all or nothing” approach to replication in the previous version, 0.8 now allows users to selectively filter which information can be copied, enabling organizations to better configure the product to meet their data governance and compliance needs.
Also new in Vault 0.8 is a disaster recovery (DR) mode that is suitable for enabling high availability (HA) and establishing multiple availability zones in a local area. The paid Enterprise edition gained multi-factor authentication support, enabling customers to manage sensitive data MFA requirements.