HashiCorp unveils 'Terraform 2.0' while tiptoeing around Big Blue elephant in the room

HashiCorp's annual HashiConf shindig wrapped up in Boston with a Big Blue elephant in the room and a hissed instruction: "Don't mention IBM!"

That the conference was in the unspoken shadow of the impending IBM acquisition was a shame since the company unveiled some useful, if not earth-shattering, updates to its product line, including a focus on Security and Infrastructure Lifecycle Management.

As Reg readers know, HashiCorp is all about tools to provision, manage, and secure cloud infrastructure. Its move to the Business Source License in 2023 caused consternation in the open source world and the rise to prominence of an open source Terraform rival, OpenTofu. One of its founders, Mitchell Hashimoto (the Hashi in HashiCorp), announced plans - not connected with the license change - to depart at the end of the same year. In April 2024, it was confirmed that IBM would buy the company for a cool $6.4 billion.

The two biggest announcements on the Infrastructure side were the move of Terraform Stacks (referred to by CTO Armon Dadgar as "Terraform 2.0") into public beta and the general availability of HCP Waypoint.

Terraform Stacks was previewed last year and the team has since made some tweaks in terms of scalability and functionality. The Register spoke with HashiCorp's VP of Marketing, Meghan Liese, who confirmed Stacks' place in the brave new world into which Terraform is marching. There are no plans to ditch the existing Workspaces technology, however, despite Stacks' role as a way to organize infrastructure and manage life cycles.

Considering that Terraform sits at the heart of HashiCorp, the company is understandably cautious about rolling out Stacks. During the public beta, it is allowing customers to experiment with the product to provision and manage up to 500 resources for free, including a new Kubernetes use case.

Kyle Ruddy, HashiCorp senior director, Technical Product Marketing, listed Stacks as his favorite feature from a practitioner perspective. He told us: "It's very interesting. It's very intriguing. I think it offers a lot of new ways to kind of streamline processes and workflows. And then, if I put my business value hat on, it's got to be Waypoint."

HCP Waypoint reached general availability at Hashi's Boston shindig and is a product to create internal developer platforms. It also includes templates and add-ons to manage application dependencies. Support for variables has been added to actions - a feature for making self-service easier - although the latter remains in public beta for the time being.

Ruddy described the service as a "new level of abstraction layer" to save users from having to dive into the HCP Terraform console.

Other infrastructure enhancements include GPU scheduling in Nomad to support AI workloads and the public beta of a tool to migrate workflows from the community edition of Terraform to HCP Terraform or Enterprise.

On the Security Lifecycle Management (SLM) side, HashiCorp showed off the auto-rotation feature now generally available in HCP Vault Secrets, alongside public betas of dynamic secrets and dynamic cloud credentials for HCP Terraform. This is handy, because Vault has joined Terraform in that it, too, was forked after HashiCorp adopted a competition-limiting license and now faces down an open source alternative. In this case, the company's secrets management project comes up against OpenBao.

The public beta of HCP Vault Radar, which hunts out secrets in code that shouldn't be there, has also gained some features: unmanaged secrets prevention and guidance for remediation of a leaked secret.

But what of IBM - those three forbidden letters? The Register spoke to Chris Reuter, head of Product Marketing at Resourcely, who expressed hope that "they'll do a Red Hat and leave it more or less alone. They [IBM] are looking to be the multi-cloud vendor."

Resourcely is one of many companies in the HashiCorp ecosystem, with a product to build "Blueprints" consisting of existing Terraform modules and integrated guidelines and advice, and "Guardrails" to act as a watchdog within an environment to ensure developers don't violate company policies. It also supports OpenTofu.

Reuter was at HashiConf to talk about a free tier being introduced by Resourcely, consisting of two blueprints and two guardrails.

Eventually, HashiCorp CEO David McJannet did address the Big Blue elephant. While there was no word on the fate of the HashiCorp team, he reiterated that IBM's multibillion-dollar acquisition of the company should close by the end of the year.

This is assuming the regulators won't prove him wrong. ®