HashiCorp Adds Consul and Vault to Cloud Platform for AWS
Infrastructure software and services provider HashiCorp continues its mission to make its entire platform and tool portfolio available on the cloud, the latest move being the recent general availability of HashiCorp Consul and the beta release of its popular Vault secrets security management tool now available on Amazon Web Services (AWS).
Under the nomenclature of “HCP Consul,” HashiCorp’s cloud service networking and service mesh product is also the first generally available service for the company HashiCorp Cloud Platform, marking a significant step in HashiCorp’s cloud platform ambitions.
“Running applications on cloud infrastructure helps organizations transform their businesses, but creates new challenges, ranging from infrastructure complexity, to skills shortages, to new types of security threats. Each of these issues slows down time-to-market and hinders an organization’s ability to achieve the business outcomes they are trying to deliver,” Amith Nair, vice president of product marketing, HashiCorp, told The New Stack. “Our customers and community have been asking us for tools that will help them to solve these challenges. The HashiCorp Cloud Platform is an offering specifically created to address these challenges.”
HashiCorp last year introduced how the HCP version of Vault will allow organizations to adopt a more flexible pricing model — as opposed to the traditional way of downloading, installing and managing Vault directly, while paying a set fee.
Both HCP Consul and HCP Vault are now available on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the company announcing, following on a previous promise to make HCP available for Azure and GCP (without disclosing an exact timeline). HashiCorp also plans to eventually make all of its HashiCorp products available on HCP, including its recently announced Boundary, an open source project for identity-based access management.
The goal of HCP’s design is “to drastically cut the operational burden for our customers, since it is managed by HashiCorp experts,” Nair said.
“With the first HCP services available, HCP Consul and HCP Vault, individuals and teams can now focus on securely building cloud native applications and migrating critical workloads to the cloud,” Nair said. “They can make the move to the cloud faster and with fewer resources.”
While service mesh is increasingly seen as necessary to manage complex cloud native environments, the management of service mesh itself can also represent complex operations-related challenges. HashiCorp’s goal for its HCP platform to address these challenges is to offer a self-service alternative for organizations for cloud infrastructure that may also want to be able to focus more on software development and deployments with fewer operations-related tasks to manage.
“Unlike other self-managed solutions that rely on third-party add-ons, HCP Consul is built and run by HashiCorp experts to reduce the operational complexity of providing service discovery or running a service mesh,” Nair said. “Individuals can now use Consul on-demand and enterprises can use Consul as a shared service, without having to stand it up themselves.”
Similar to HCP Consul, HCP Vault was designed to allow organizations to leverage Vault “without the overhead, manual maintenance and associated costs,” Nair said. “They get the benefits of secrets management and encryption for their cloud environments without having to set up and manage a new tool,” Nair said.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) and HashiCorp are sponsors of The New Stack.
Feature image via Pixabay.
