HashiCorp, an IBM company, is making a stronger case for unifying the lifecycle management of infrastructure across hybrid cloud computing environments.
Vanessa Fournier, senior director of product marketing at HashiCorp, said platform teams that have recently emerged in enterprise IT organizations are now the primary drivers of adoption of the software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering that unifies the management of IT infrastructure, The overall goal is to provide a control plane through which platform teams can provide self-service capabilities to application developers in a more thoughtful way that goes well beyond using Terraform to provision IT infrastructure-as-code, she added.
As part of that effort, HashiCorp is now extending the reach of that platform to include security operations in addition to providing tighter integrations with the Ansible IT automation platform from Red Hat, which is also an arm of IBM, she noted.
For example, HashiCorp has now made HCP Vault Radar, a tool to detect and remediate unmanaged secrets and credential sprawl across environments, generally available, while the latest version of Vault Enterprise includes post-quantum cryptography updates along with support for constrained Certificate Authorities and automated root password rotation. A Sentinel policy library for Amazon Web Services (AWS) that enforces secure-by-default configurations with pre-written policies is also not generally available.
In addition, an HCP Waypoint tool provides access to an internal developer platform (IDP) that provides access to rollback and restart capabilities that can be invoked via either a user interface (UI) or command line interface (CLI). HashiCorp has also embedded observability capabilities into its Consul service mesh.
When coupled with forthcoming integrations with Ansible and existing integrations with IBM mainframes, the scope of the infrastructure lifecycle management (ILM) capabilities that HashiCorp provides is now being extended into Day 2 operations, including security, both in the cloud and across on-premises IT environments, said Fournier.
It’s not clear how widespread adoption of platform engineering as a methodology for managing DevOps workflows at scale, but a Futurum Group survey finds that more than a quarter of respondents (26%) have mastered platform engineering, compared to 41% who are still working toward applying platform engineering across multiple projects. Another 24% are still working toward operationalizing a set of best practices for platform engineering, while 7% are just getting started.
Roughly half of platform engineering teams provide cloud/multi-cloud management (52%) and dev/test/production environment support (48%). DevOps toolchains (43%), standard platform configurations (42%) and containers/Kubernetes (41%) support are also prevalent in platform engineering teams. Metrics being used to track whether platform engineering teams are successful include developer productivity (64%), fewer security incidents or failures (62%), software release frequency (59%), developer satisfaction (58%), reduction of costs (50%) and reduced complexity (29%).
Regardless of motivation, the need to unify the management of IT infrastructure has become more crucial as the number of workloads being deployed across highly distributed computing environments only continues to increase. Most organizations simply can’t afford to continue to have separate IT teams to manage each platform they deploy, so the only practical way forward is to unify those teams in a way that makes it simpler to provision and update IT infrastructure at scale.