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HashiConf Global Preview: Sessions for Cloud Platform Teams

As enterprise cloud strategies mature, “platform teams” have become a best practice. Platform teams build, run, and support infrastructure and backing services that are exposed to development teams as self-service offerings.

HashiConf Global (livestream Tuesday – Wednesday, October 19 – 20, and rebroadcast for the Asia/Pacific time zones on Wednesday – Thursday, October 20 – 21) is packed with sessions designed for platform teams. Here’s a preview of the relevant HashiConf talks grouped into popular cloud architecture pillars: Operational Excellence, Security, and Reliability.

»Operational Excellence

»Tide’s Self-Service Service Mesh With Consul

Wednesday, October 20, 12:30 p.m. ET

Tide Business Bank — a leading UK FinTech firm — tells its HashiCorp Consul adoption story. This talk is especially relevant for platform owners using Amazon Web Services (AWS). Jez Halford, Tide’s Head of Cloud Engineering, explains how Tide uses HCP Consul to wire up Amazon ECS and EC2, as well as ECS and AWS Fargate. Interestingly, the move to Consul came without downtime or a painful “big bang” migration. If you want greater networking automation across different AWS runtimes — and want to upgrade from your status quo — here’s your playbook.

»A Journey to Improving SLOs With HashiCorp Vault

Wednesday, October 20, 2:00 pm ET

Experienced cloud engineers tend to have a story or two about the expired certificate everyone forgot about. Good secrets management hygiene is essential to application — and platform — uptime and reliability. In this session, George Hantzaras, a cloud engineering leader at Citrix, explains how HashiCorp Vault improved service level objectives (SLOs) in the company’s observability infrastructure.

»Redeploying Stateless Systems in Lieu of Patching

Tuesday, October 19, 1:00 pm ET

Seasoned operators know that patching is a way of life. But does it have to be? Chris Manfre, a Senior DevOps Engineer at Petco, says “no.” In this talk, he describes a better approach to vulnerability mitigation: replace unpatched instances with new instances that feature updated templates. He explains how HashiCorp Packer and HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise can help you adopt this immutable infrastructure best practice.

»Security

»Vault for Secrets Management in Consul K8s

Tuesday, October 19, 12:30 pm ET

We’re all hearing a lot about zero trust security these days, and for good reason. It’s the modern approach to protecting critical systems and customer data. But what does implementing zero trust security really entail?

Here’s a starting point: modernize your infrastructure around the new control point for security: identity. This is what the most secure organizations have done in recent years. From there, platform teams can authenticate and authorize access for services and users alike. That sounds great, but how do you actually do that in the real world? This talk will give you a big part of the answer, especially if you’re a Kubernetes shop.

Kyle Schochenmaier, HashiCorp Senior Engineer on the Consul Ecosystem, and HashiCorp Senior Product Manager David Yu HashiCorp explain how to use Vault as the secrets management backend for Consul atop Kubernetes. They also explain how to rotate secrets in Consul on Kubernetes. Attend this talk, and you’ll be in a much stronger position to combine the protections from Vault (machine authN and authZ) with those from Consul (machine-to-machine access).

»Managing Target’s Secrets Platform

Tuesday, October 19, 1:30 p.m. ET

Every vertical industry has its own unique security challenges. Retailers around the world use HashiCorp’s tech to improve their security posture. This is a big job, and it requires constant vigilance from platform teams in this sector. Target — one of the largest retailers in the US with more than 1,900 locations — has an extraordinarily large attack surface to protect. Shane Petrich, a Target Lead Engineer, details how Target keeps its HashiCorp Vault deployment humming.

»Vault Roadmap

Tuesday, October 19, 2:00 p.m. PT

There’s a reason why Vault is the dominant secrets management solution for platform teams: it’s incredibly powerful and it continues to get even better. So what innovations do we have planned for Vault in the near future? Attend this session and hear the specifics from Darshant Bhagat, Product Head for Vault, and Naaman Newbold Vault Director of Engineering.

»Reliability

»Consul Use Cases At Stripe: Service Mesh and More

Tuesday, October 19, 1:30 p.m. PT

Interest in the service mesh pattern is surging. According to the HashiCorp State of Strategy Cloud survey, service mesh adoption is expected to grow 250% in the year ahead. If this is on your roadmap, who better to learn from than Stripe? After all, even a few seconds of downtime could cost the fintech giant millions. This company is on the cutting edge of modern networking, and there’s a lot to learn from its experience with Consul and Kubernetes.

Mark Guan and Ruoran Wang, Software Engineers at Stripe, reveal the details of their multi-region service networking tech stack. If this sounds like an impressive feat of engineering, it is. This duo gives you an inside look at their overall topology across various AWS accounts and regions, and how they federated multi-region clusters together.

»The Future of HCP Packer

Tuesday, October 20, 12:30 p.m. ET

Platform teams use Packer to create identical machine images for multiple clouds from a single source configuration. Meanwhile, these same teams use Terraform to deploy images. What if there was a way to bring these two technologies closer together? That’s the vision behind HCP Packer: bridge the image-management workflows between Packer and Terraform. This service was first announced at HashiConf Europe in June.

Megan Marsh, Packer’s Engineering Lead, will demonstrate the product and unveil exciting roadmap details. And don’t miss the hands-on lab for HCP Packer at 1:30 p.m. ET on Wednesday, October 20.

»Network Automation on Terraform Cloud With CTS

Wednesday, October 20, 1:30 p.m. PT

Ticketing systems are the enemy of the modern platform team. They served their purpose in years past; now we’re in the era of automation and self-service. Yet even the most determined enterprise likely has a few workflows that still depend on tickets. One stubborn scenario: requests for network configuration changes. Here, dev teams are ready to release new code to production, but the new code requires firewall policy updates or changes to the load balancer member pool.

This session focuses on Consul-Terraform-Sync (CTS), a new capability that automates this gap in your workflow. HashiCorp Senior Engineers Melissa Kam, and Kim Ngo show you how CTS introduces network infrastructure automation to Consul and integrates directly with Terraform Cloud. Attend this session and learn how CTS monitors changes to the L7 network layer, and subsequently uses Terraform to dynamically update infrastructure.

»Workday’s Multi-Cloud Network Fabric With Consul & Vault

Wednesday, October 20, 1:00 p.m. ET

The hallmark of a reliable distributed system is that it continues to behave as expected even as it changes rapidly. Workday’s platform team has supported rapid growth and innovation over the last few years. To handle this growth, it uses Consul and Vault as part of its critical infrastructure. Workday Principal Engineer Daniele Vazzola explains how his company uses HashiCorp’s tools to support deployments across multiple cloud providers and on-premises datacenters. He even digs into how this multi-cloud fabric empowers service teams to autonomously set up secure connections across datacenters between workloads running on heterogeneous platforms. Don’t miss it!

»Join Us for the Livestreams

These fantastic talks are only a small part of what you’ll experience at HashiConf Global, happening online Tuesday – Wednesday, October 19 – 20 (and rebroadcast for the Asia/Pacific time zones on Wednesday – Thursday, October 20 – 21). This year, in addition to the visionary keynote sessions and dozens of useful practitioner talks, we’ve added free hands-on labs. For platform teams, we recommend the labs: Vault as a Certificate Authority (CA) for Consul Connect and Create a Custom Provider With the Terraform Plugin Framework.

Source: HashiCorp Blog

»1. Multi-Cloud Is Here. And There. And Almost Everywhere.

Our survey made it clear that multi-cloud is no longer merely an aspirational goal but an everyday reality for the vast majority of respondents. More than three quarters of respondents said they were already using more than one cloud, and 86% said they expected to be doing so in two years.

Not so long ago, that result might have raised eyebrows, but now similar findings are showing up from many sources. In 2020, IDC predicted that by 2022, “over 90% of enterprises worldwide will be relying on a mix of on-premises/dedicated private clouds, multiple public clouds, and legacy platforms to meet their infrastructure needs.” Methodologies vary, but many recent surveys seem to indicate that’s exactly what’s happening. According to Flexera’s 2021 State of the Cloud Report, for example, 92% of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy and 82% have a hybrid cloud strategy combining public and private clouds.

Largely concurs, indicating that from 2020 to 2012, “hybrid cloud adoption has increased by 12%, while multi-cloud models have increased 11%,” making hybrid cloud the most common deployment of cloud globally, with Asia-Pacific having the greatest level of penetration. By contrast, the Accelerate State of DevOps 2021 survey showed 34% using a combination of public cloud with private cloud/datacenter/on-premises deployments and 21% using multiple public clouds.

»2. Digital Transformation Isn’t Always the Top Driver of Multi-Cloud Adoption

In our survey, digital transformation was the top factor driving multi-cloud adoption, but it was ranked in the top three by only a third (34%) of respondents and followed closely by avoiding vendor lock-in (30%), cost reduction (28%), and scaling (25%).

The 2020 IDC report, meanwhile, suggested that multi-cloud helps enterprises achieve “better performance, 24/7 availability, enhanced security, and greater compliance with regulations.”

The Accelerate DevOps report found similar fragmentation. Leveraging the unique benefits of each provider was the most commonly named reason for using multiple cloud providers, but was chosen by only about a quarter (26%) of respondents (respondents were allowed to select only one). According to that report, this suggests that when respondents select an additional provider, they look for differentiation between their current provider and alternatives. The second most common reason for moving to multi-cloud was availability (22%). Unsurprisingly, respondents who have adopted multiple cloud providers were “1.5 times more likely to meet or exceed their reliability targets.”

»3. Cloud Investment Keeps Growing: Is it Paying Off?

Money always matters, and that’s certainly true in the cloud, where there’s increasingly big money at stake. According to the HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy survey, more than 15% of respondents budgeted at least $10 million on their multi-cloud initiatives, and that figure ballooned to 34% of large enterprises. (Six percent of respondents budgeted $50 million or more.)

And in 2020, the IDC report suggested that respondents devote an average of $73.8 million — almost a third (32%) of their IT budget — to the cloud.

Of course, managing cloud spend is just as important as the actual numbers, and almost 40% of respondents to the HashiCorp survey ended up busting their cloud budget, spending more on the cloud than they planned. Surprisingly, bigger budgets seemed to lead to even more spending: 46% of companies budgeting $2 million to $10 million on cloud overspent, compared to just 27% of companies budgeting less than $100,000. Reasons for the overspending range from shifting priorities to COVID-19 to poorly managed resources.

Other surveys found similar results. In the Flexera survey, for example, 36% of enterprises said they spent more than $12 million on the cloud, while 83% spent more than $1.2 million. That’s up significantly from last year, when 20% of enterprises said they spent more than $12 million, and 74% spent more than $1.2 million.

But the Accelerate DevOps Report offers a ray of hope in this area, noting that “respondents who use hybrid or multi-cloud were 1.6 times more likely to exceed their organizational performance targets.

»4. The Cloud Skills Shortage Is Worse Than You Think

One theme that emerged from the HashiCorp State of Cloud Strategy survey is that many organizations are struggling to develop the in-house skill sets they need to manage a robust cloud infrastructure. That was cited as a top-three multi-cloud challenge by 57% of respondents, and a top-three cloud inhibitor by 41% of respondents. The problem was especially acute in the public sector (53%) and consumer goods/retail companies (51%).

The need for “cloud native application development and operations skills” topped the list of 46% of hiring managers in a recent survey report from The Linux Foundation and edX. To be fair, though, the skills issue reaches beyond the need for cloud and container technologies, as ZDNet notes 92% of respondents said they were struggling to find new talent more generally and even to “hold onto existing talent in the face of fierce competition.”

The PwC Cloud Business Survey confirms that the shift to cloud has “only intensified” the “severe talent challenges that are a byproduct of digital transformation.” According to the report, more than half (52%) of “executives cite lack of tech talent — such as skills in cloud architecture, cybersecurity, or DevOps — as a barrier to realizing cloud value. And it gets worse: The report notes that “the digital talent divide affects not just tech specialists, but employees and business leaders who have the skills and mindset to thrive in a cloud-empowered world.”

»5. Yes, the COVID-19 Pandemic Is Accelerating Cloud Adoption

It’s tempting to blame companies scrambling to cope with the effects of the global pandemic for turbocharging the adoption of multi-cloud architectures. But while that’s clearly a factor, the situation is a bit more complicated. While more than half (54%) of HashiCorp survey respondents said that COVID had accelerated their cloud and multi-cloud adoption, most of them called the impact low or moderate.

Other surveys also showed pronounced pandemic effects, Almost half (47%) of global respondents to the Equinix survey said COVID had accelerated their digital transformation plans as a result of COVID-19. And 9 out of 10 respondents to the Flexera survey said COVID led to cloud usage “slightly higher than planned” (61%) or “significantly higher than planned” (29%).