DEVOPSdigest

HashiCorp released the next generation of HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise, software for provisioning cloud-based and on-premises infrastructure using a consistent workflow.

The newest features of Terraform Enterprise enable collaboration among practitioners using HashiCorp Terraform and provide governance and policy management capabilities with HashiCorp’s Sentinel policy as code framework.

Terraform is broadly used among the Global 2000 to address the challenge of infrastructure provisioning as organizations adopt cloud and deal with heterogeneity, scale, and dependency management of cloud-based infrastructure. Terraform Enterprise focuses on addressing challenges for organization as they scale their provisioning practices across their organization with Terraform. Terraform Enterprise enables teams to collaborate on infrastructure as code for safe and efficient provisioning automation, simple reuse of configuration to enable developers to provision infrastructure to run their applications, and policy as code automation to provide necessary provisioning constraints while not unnecessarily blocking infrastructure provisioning.

"Terraform has enabled us to codify the different functional pieces of our infrastructure using a common configuration language to automate infrastructure provisioning,” said Jay Christopherson, principal engineer, DevOps, Spaceflight. “Terraform Enterprise provides the UI and collaboration workflow for our developers to safely and efficiently provision and update infrastructure quickly and for each phase of their software development— dev, test, and production. This reduces the overall time we spend building systems and rolling out changes and gives us more time to build our products.”

New features and enhancements in Terraform Enterprise include:

- Workspace management and new modern and responsive UI: The Terraform Enterprise UI has been redesigned and integrated with Workspaces. Workspaces enable organizations to decompose infrastructure into modular components that can be delegated and owned by separate teams. This is analogous to having multiple Git repositories which together form a larger application. Workspaces can then match an organization’s permissions structure and be used to delegate granular operational control. The modern and responsive web-based UI enables teams to use Workspaces to safely collaborate on infrastructure configurations.

- Comprehensive API coverage: Terraform Enterprise provides an API for organizations to integrate with their existing tooling or application delivery pipelines.

- Provisioning governance with Sentinel policy as code management: When provisioning at scale, it becomes difficult to make sure constraints are in-place to ensure business and security policy are being maintained. Sentinel is integrated into Terraform Enterprise to address these challenges. Organizations can apply Sentinel policies between every Terraform plan and apply to define which actions are allowed and denied.

- SAML support: This enhances governance and secure sign-on capabilities for organizations using Terraform Enterprise. SAML eliminates all passwords and instead uses standard cryptography and digital signatures to pass a secure sign-in token from an identity provider to Terraform Enterprise.

- Service accounts: This allows organizations to do service to service API integrations without having to authenticate with an individual user. This is ideal for organizations integrating Terraform into their application delivery pipelines.

“Terraform has seen tremendous adoption globally by helping infrastructure operators with the complexity of provisioning and managing diverse infrastructure,” said Armon Dadgar, Founder and Co-CTO of HashiCorp. “Terraform Enterprise is a natural extension to the open source version of Terraform and focuses on providing a way for teams of operators to collaborate while providing the necessary policy guardrails these organizations need for their IT infrastructure. The general availability announcement culminates a successful beta phase, where we worked with more than 100 organizations to make sure Terraform Enterprise effectively addresses the requirements for organizations of all sizes and complexities.”