HashiCorp’s Terraform Module Registry Provides Self-Service Modules from Behind the Firewall
Last year, HashiCorp revealed its Terraform Module Registry, a publicly accessible archive of useful, ready-to-go community additions to the provisioning platform. Now, the company launched an enterprise version of the Terraform Module Registry, which is designed to function inside the firewall. This internally usable Terraform Enterprise Module Registry will allow enterprises to spread the capabilities of Terraform to employees who may not be trained in how to use the platform.
“There’s usually a small group of IT operators running [Terraform], and the private module registry shrinks the public one to bring it in-house and wrap it in an access control system,” said Armon Dadgar, chief technology officer of HashiCorp. “You can use it to provision a Java application, a database, and connect that to Amazon SQS, and you’re doing it in the way that meets all the compliance legal and governance requirements enterprises have,” said Dadgar.
Using Terraform Enterprise Module Registry, a small number of internal publishers can make available the tools needed by other users to provision the systems they need. This also includes a wizard, which will help users find the modules they need and get them up and running in an easy-to-use process. Dadgar touts this as HashiCorp’s first WYSIWYG-based user interface offering.
Dadgar said that the enterprise version allows for the blessing of modules for use internally, meaning that governance and compliance can be enforced against the modules made available to teams. “They can en masse import everything from the public module registry, and make it available. Or, they can white-list. Largely what we find is the public modules don’t work for enterprises. Global banks are bound to so many regulations and controls, you can’t just boot a VM. That VM can only be a certain AMI, have certain controls, be in certain groups, and most of these groups have tens to hundreds of controls per resource,” said Dadgar.
This then allows those development teams to move away from the old model, which required them to request a new server from IT operations. “Instead,” said Dadgar, “Here’s a wiki to tell you how to provision it yourself. Don’t file a ticket, don’t wait for central IT. That’s the push: this organizational shift that IT shops want.”
The release of Terraform Enterprise Module Registry marks the first fruits of HashiCorp’s large rewrite to version 2 of the platform’s internals last year. Dadgar said that, now, the internal rewrites are done and 2018 promises to hold many new updates for Terraform.
“Version 2 was a ground-up rewrite of version 1. We were frustrated because we couldn’t ship new features because of architectural baggage from version 1. Now, this year, we have a large, deep roadmap. We’re in a much better place architecturally, so there’s a lot of good stuff coming down the pipe for Terraform Enterprise,” said Dadgar.
Feature image via Pixabay.
