Cloud infrastructure automation company HashiCorp flagged up a raft of new releases and features across its product lineup at its developer conference this week.
Among the unveilings were a preview 1.4 release of Consul, the company’s service mesh that connects services so that they can communicate securely with each other across multiple cloud environments. This sees also the general availability of Consul Connect, a service originally beta tested in Consul version 1.2, which was announced in June. Connect turns any existing Consul cluster into a service mesh solution.
The Consul goody bag contained another surprise. A new feature in Consul Enterprise makes the system usable in multi-data centre environments by working across multiple clusters.
The conference also saw the announcement of Nomad 0.9. The latest version of its application deployment workflow management system will include new abilities to place workloads based on the current state of the runtime environment, and the spreading of workloads across different data centres or availability zones. 0.9 will also boot lower priority jobs from clusters to support higher priority jobs when it nears full compute capacity. It will include support for plug-ins and the submission of jobs via the web user interface.
The company also released version 1.0 of Vault, its central secrets storage system. This product, which has been available in pre-1.0 versions for three years, manages developer secrets ranging from application source code to configuration management files. It also generates and stores dynamic encryption keys for applications, effectively providing encryption as a service for developers. One new feature is the inclusion of its auto unseal facility into the free open source release of the software. This enables developers to unseal secrets automatically on major cloud platforms.
Fans of HashiCorp’s Terraform infrastructure provisioning system will also be pleased to see the introduction of collaboration features across the board. Team members will now be able to run Terraform plans in one location where all collaborators can review them, and use version control to manage them.
These features had previously only been available to enterprise customers, but practitioners and small teams will now be able to get them for free, and businesses will be able to get it for “affordable pricing” which has yet to be finalised. The functionality will begin beta testing later in the year, it said.
HashiCorp also talked up its support for Kubernetes, which it has been building out this year in its products. These include a Helm chart for Consul deployment on Kubernetes, and a Helm provider for Terraform. Vault also supports the storage of Kubernetes secrets, too.