Organizations have adopted infrastructure as code to maintain efficiency and minimize risk for their cloud infrastructures, however, they are now tasked with creating new features to aid security, compliance, and operational consistency. Until infrastructure is provisioned, IT teams struggle to test the code or module inputs that might result in misconfigurations or failures, which are responsible for up to 70 percent of security events, according to Trend Micro. Once infrastructure is provisioned, IT teams are then tasked with ensuring that the actual state of infrastructure reflects the known and recorded infrastructure state on an ongoing basis.

Terraform Cloud and Terraform Enterprise provide a consistent approach for teams to compose, collaborate, publish, and reuse infrastructure as code to provision any infrastructure. To address additional Day 2 operational challenges, HashiCorp is delivering features to bolster the ability of organizations to confidently standardize their Terraform usage:

• Continuous Checks provided by Drift Detection detect changes between infrastructure and what Terraform has reflected in the state file. Where drift is detected a notification is sent in order for the appropriate people to take action.
• Pre- or post conditions available in Terraform 1.2, adds a framework for granular testing and error messaging within the code, which is then validated during the plan or apply of a Terraform Run.
• Ecosystem checks with Run Tasks enables external services to inject policies and other checks into the Terraform Cloud workflow. Run tasks released with 12 integrations including Bridgecrew, Infracost, Snyk, Styra for security, compliance, code scanning, and cost analysis.

“These enhancements to Terraform Cloud continue to deliver capabilities that organizations need to manage their infrastructure day in and day out — providing multi-cloud visibility without the tedium and risk of constant manual intervention,” said Meghan Liese, senior director of infrastructure product marketing at HashiCorp. “We want to give our customers the help they need for cloud operations not just when they are getting started, but for Day 2 and beyond. With Terraform Cloud, customers can reduce risk by better understanding what infrastructure they have provisioned and then embed checks into their infrastructure provisioning and management to minimize vulnerabilities that impact security, compliance, or cloud spend.”

HashiCorp Terraform Cloud and Enterprise offerings have more than 2,000 enterprise customers globally, supported by a growing ecosystem that includes 2,000 providers, with 250 integrations across 200 tech partners, and Terraform open source has been downloaded more than 100 million times. Terraform Enterprise is used by organizations including 3M, ABN AMRO, booking.com, Comcast, Decathlon, Deutsche Boerse Group, KeyCorp, Lufthansa, MediaMarkt, Morgan Stanley, OVHcloud, Roche, Samsung, Starbucks, State Farm, Vodafone, Wayfair.

Earnin, a financial services company that provides earned wage access services, has been using HashiCorp Terraform for over three years and as a result of their use of Terraform, provisioning and other operations processes are now five times faster for their cloud ops team.

“With Terraform Enterprise, our cloud operations team has time to focus on high-level tasks like system architecture and governance. Terraform automates often repetitive and tedious processes, which allows us to focus on what matters, driving the business and serving our community members,” said Joe Brinkman, engineering manager, cloud operations, Earnin. “The Earnin cloud ops team can write Terraform configurations for Terraform with just a few lines of code. We can provision workplaces in just minutes while providing visibility into all source code. We would not be able to manage infrastructure and scale to support community members without Terraform.”

Availability

Drift Detection for Terraform Cloud is now available. Drift Detection for Terraform Enterprise will be available soon.