HashiCorp has pressed go on Terraform 0.15, marking the beginning of the pre-release period that will lead up to the 1.0 release of the infrastructure-as-code provisioning tool.

Terraform 0.15 includes a number of improvements that solidify Terraform workflows and ensure the stability of Terraform’s feature set for the long term, according to HashiCorp. It is immediately available for download as well as for use in Terraform Cloud, its managed service offering for provisioning infrastructure in the cloud.

Among the highlights of Terraform 0.15 is unified console support. This is designed to deliver a significant foundational improvement by unifying the console experience across all supported platforms, bringing consistent UTF-8 support and a move to virtual terminal sequences on Microsoft Windows.

HashiCorp also says it has relaxed the remote state data source parser requirements in this release, in order to help users adopt new versions of Terraform into their workflows without having to immediately upgrade existing Terraform codebases.

This feature has apparently been backported into the 0.14.0, 0.13.6 and 0.12.30 releases, and so these versions of Terraform and above will be able to access remote state data sources in versions of Terraform up to 1.0.x at the time of its release.

Another highlight is state file format stability, which is intended to allow customers to more easily move between versions of Terraform. This means that Terraform state is cross-compatible between versions 0.14.x, 0.15.x, and the future 1.0.x releases.

HashiCorp has improved Terraform’s logging behaviour in the release with the introduction of structured logging levels. This allows developers using the latest SDK (v.2.4+) to target messages to specific log levels. Terraform CLI and provider logging levels can also both be controlled independently.

Also released this week was HashiCorp’s Boundary 0.2, an update of the firm’s identity-based remote access management tool. This release includes several key features and improvements, including the ability to authenticate to Boundary using OIDC authentication methods with an external identity provider (IDP) of the users’ choice, such as Azure Active Directory or Okta.

Also new is Boundary Desktop for MacOS, giving users the ability to connect to remote targets and view active session details from a convenient Mac desktop application. Windows support will be added in a future update.