Infrastructure automation expert HashiCorp recently finished work on version 1.5 of its secret management tool Vault and pushed out some other product updates to improve the user experience for certain setups.
Just a month after teasing a number of additions to the company’s portfolio at HashiConf Digital, the Vault team provided users with some enhancements to improve environmental safety. They are now able to, for example, limit the maximum amount of requests per second to a system or mount, while paying users also get to put a cap on the number of leases generated on a path.
Other than that, version 1.5 includes a way of specifying integrated storage as the high availability coordination option, and the Vault Helm chart has been reworked so that it can be used for installing and configuring the tool (or the Vault Agent Injection Mutating Webhook) on OpenShift.
Starting with this release, operators are free to customise how passwords are generated, and specify the namespace of the SSH mount in the SSH helper. Microsoft users also get expanded Azure AD groups support in the OIDC Auth provider, and have an option for static credential rotation for the company’s SQL Server available to them.
As usual, the Enterprise version of Vault 1.5 comes with some additional goodies. This time these comprise a Splunk app to help users keep an eye on Vault’s health, and easier to read dashboards in the replication UI. The product has also been certified to work with VMware vSphere and NetAPP ONTAP with additional details available in two newly released whitepapers.
Speaking of resources, Vault Learn has been fitted with a couple of tutorials to guide users through the new features, which means those wondering how to use the Helm Chart or Splunk app for example are advised to head over there for some tips on how to get started.
In other HashiCorp news, the company has announced their Consul Service (HCS) on Azure to be generally available. HCS is meant to enable teams to use the Consul service networking platform for things like automated network configuration, service discovery, and communication via service meshes on Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) or VM-based environments.
Those who’ve already tried their hand at HCS will find a couple of changes in the GA release. For instance, it can be used in development and production clusters (also in high availability scenarios), and includes an Azure CLI extension. Teams looking to realise more complex hybrid setups will have to wait for a little while longer – capabilities to leverage WAN federation over mesh gateways, which could help with that, are planned to land in one of the next releases.
Meanwhile Linux aficionados are now able to get their Vault, Consul, and Nomad packages from an official HashiCorp Linux repository. This was set up to “ease the installation and upgrade process”. The Debian and RPM packages in the repo are meant to support “many versions of Debian, Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, RHEL, and AmazonLinux”. Additional packages for Terraform, Packer, and Vagrant are already in the works.