Terraform Beta Supports Multicloud, Complex Environments

BOSTON — A beta offering by Hashicorp will allow Terraform users to streamline the provisioning and management of cloud resources, including Kubernetes.

The new offering, called Stacks, is a Terraform feature that allows customers to deploy Kubernetes in a single configuration instead of having to manually manage multiple independent Terraform configurations, the company said Monday at the kick-off at its annual HashiConf user conference.

Stacks was introduced last November in part as a multicloud play. It has been in a closed beta, but at the time the company promised it would provide a way to simplify provisioning and managing resources at scale.

It’s aimed at addressing a problem created by splitting infrastructure across multiple Terraform configurations.

“Terraform’s ability to take code, build a graph of dependencies, and turn it into infrastructure is extremely powerful,” the company stated in a November 2023 blog post. “However, once you split your infrastructure across multiple Terraform configurations, the isolation between states means you must stitch together and manage dependencies yourself.”

The post noted that this also leads to teams needing to provision the same infrastructure repeatedly with different input values across multiple environments, cloud providers, regions and landing zones.

Hashicorp said they often see Kubernetes deployments in particular that are challenging to manage due to too many unknown variables. These make it hard to properly complete a plan. Stacks allows users to manage Kubernetes deployments faster and at scale without going through a layered approach that is currently hard to complete within Terraform, the company explained.

The ability to enable the Kubernetes use case is due to a Stacks feature called deferred changes. It allows Terraform to produce a partial plan when it encounters too many unknown values without stopping operations. Users can then work through unknown situations more easily, which accelerates the deployment of Kubernetes and certain other workloads with Terraform.

Another new feature is Stacks orchestration rules, which allow customers to automate repetitive actions. Users can do things like automatically approve a plan when certain orchestration criteria are met, which simplifies the management of large numbers of deployments by codifying orchestration checks that are aware of plan context within the Terraform workflow.

Other use cases for Stacks are:

• Deploying an entire application with components like networking, storage and compute as a single unit without worrying about dependencies. It can be used by users who don’t have advanced Terraform experience.
• Deploying across multiple regions, availability zones, and cloud provider accounts without duplicating effort/code.

Stacks allows users to define multiple instances of the same deployment configuration without the need to copy and paste configurations or manage separately. A change made to a Stacks configuration can be rolled out across all or some or none of the deployments in a Stacks.

Stacks in Beta

The Stacks public beta is available for new HCP Terraform plans, based on resources under management (RUM). Users will be able to provision and manage up to 500 resources for free.

The company said Tuesday it’s all part of a common theme to let your developers move fast and focus on innovation.

In addition to Stacks, the company announced additional features to help build, deploy and manage cloud infrastructure:

Terraform migrate, also available in public beta, automates the migration of do-it-yourself workflows from Terraform Community Edition to HCP Terraform or Terraform Enterprise — addressing a common problem for users, who typically begin with the community edition before scaling up to the enterprise or HCP Terraform editions; New templates and add-ons with API support for HCP Waypoint, which is the company’s internal developer platform offering; and enhanced GPU support for Nomad, which is a container orchestration platform that enables users to deploy and manage applications across multiple clusters and cloud environments.

Disclosure: HashiCorp paid for the reporter’s traveling and lodging for this conference.