devopsy.kinsta.cloud

Tag: consul

  • HashiCorp Unfurls Cloud Platform for Managed Services

    HashiCorp today at its online HashiConf Digital event launched HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP), through which it intends to make all of its software available as a fully managed service.

    At the same time, HashiCorp announced a public beta of an update to HashiCorp Terraform, a curated instance of an open source tool for configuring IT infrastructure that adds additional workflow capabilities.

    Finally, an update to Nomad, a cluster manager and scheduler for containerized application environments, adds support for multiple clusters as well as the Container Network Interface (CNI) specification defined by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF).

    Rob Genova, director of product marketing for cloud services at HashiCorp, said although the company previously made some of its offering available as a managed service, HCP will serve as a foundation on which HashiCorp will manage updates to its software on behalf of end customers.

    The first managed service on HCP, now available in private beta, is an instance of the Consul service mesh deployed on Amazon Web Services (AWS), which will be followed by an instance of Vault, secrets management software developed HashiCorp, that will also be deployed on AWS.

    At the core of HCP is a HashiCorp Virtual Network (HVN), which offers a common abstraction across cloud providers around an isolated single-tenant network. Each HVN can have multiple services deployed within it. In the future, HashiCorp is promising HVN will enable peering across cloud providers and cross-provider clustering of its software. Support for additional cloud services will be added based on customer demand, added Genova.

    HCP will be offered on a pay-as-you-go pricing model to minimize upfront costs, which Genova said should make Consul and other HCP services more accessible to smaller teams and organizations. Costs will increase only when workloads scale. Both development and production pricing options will be made available, he said.

    HashiCorp already provides access to hosted instances of Consul and Terraform, which it will continue to offer alongside HCP, Genova added.

    Genova said it’s become apparent more organizations would prefer to have HashiCorp manage Consul, Vault, Terraform and Nomad on their behalf. At a time when many organizations have limited IT resources, Genova said many organizations want to devote the bulk of their limited internal resources to building and deploying applications rather than the infrastructure required to maintain them.

    It’s not clear how many organizations will opt to rely more on managed services in the wake of the economic downturn brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. At a time when many organizations are either reducing or freezing headcount, all options are being considered. Many internal IT teams may occasionally employ a managed service to extend their own capabilities. In other cases, developers may bypass an IT operations team altogether.

    In the wake of the pandemic, Genova noted more organizations simply want to deploy resources in the cloud to ensure availability while gaining increased flexibility.

    Regardless of the path chosen, the days when IT teams felt more compelled to do everything themselves are, for better or worse, changing utterly.

  • HashiCorp Extends Consul Service Mesh Reach

    HashiCorp Extends Consul Service Mesh Reach

    HashiCorp today made available an update to its Consul service mesh that makes it easier to integrate legacy and modern applications.

    Service meshes have emerged as a framework for documenting and controlling how application services interact with one another. Most of the adoption of service meshes thus far has involved applications built using microservices. With potentially hundreds or even thousands of microservices to manage, a service mesh framework becomes essential.

    HashiCorp Consul 1.8 extends the reach of the Consul service mesh by making available additional gateway and compliance features that make it easier to integrate any service into any mesh, in addition to adding support for audit Logging and single sign-on (SSO) capabilities.

    Amith Nair, vice president of product marketing for HashiCorp, said organizations that adopt Consul can apply a service mesh to both microservices and monolithic applications. That approach also eliminates the need to deploy a service mesh such as Istio, which only works when deployed in conjunction with a Kubernetes cluster.

    In general, Nair said Consul enables IT organizations to gain the benefits of a service mesh without being required to retire existing application services or manage them in isolation from modern cloud-native applications.

    Longer-term, Nair said HashiCorp expects an ecosystem to develop around Consul as technology partners extend the core capability of a service mesh to add, for example, application firewall services.

    It’s too early to say to what degree IT organizations will embrace service meshes as a technology. However, as IT environments become more complex many enterprise IT organizations are shifting toward managing services rather than individual applications. That approach enables IT organizations to align their IT strategy more easily with specific business outcomes.

    At a time when many organizations are also trying to accelerate a transition to digital business processes in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, most of those digital business processes are typically a collection of loosely coupled application services that could be managed via a service mesh.

    Nair said while it’s still early in terms of adoption, most enterprise IT organizations are now at least aware of what a service mesh does and why they might need to deploy one. The challenge, of course, will be getting IT organizations to prioritize the deployment of a service mesh when many IT budgets have become suddenly constrained. It’s also not clear who inside of those IT organizations will fund service mesh projects, which benefit a variety of application projects—application owners tend not to directly fund centralized IT management services, which leaves it up to IT leaders to fund. The challenge is, most IT budget dollars are already allocated.

    In the meantime, developers will continue to embrace everything from Kubernetes to serverless computing frameworks. However, the rate at which new applications are deployed generally far exceeds the rate at which applications are retired. As such, IT organizations should expect to find themselves managing a wide array of different types of application services for many years to come.

  • Buried in Code

    Buried in Code

  • HashiCorp Advances Open Source Consul Service Mesh

    HashiCorp Advances Open Source Consul Service Mesh

    HashiCorp this week updated its Consul service mesh to make it easier to manage namespaces across multiple services.

    Previously, DevOps teams would have to manually ensure each namespace assigned to a group of services did not conflict with each other. The release of 1.7 of Consul enables teams to restrict access to services residing in isolated environments on a shared cluster, eliminating the issue.

    In addition, DevOps teams can now delegate administrative privileges for a given namespace to individual teams, which enables them to manage their own services in keeping with best DevOps practices, rather than having to rely on a cybersecurity team to manage that process for them.

    With the rise of microservices based on containers, interest in service meshes to provide a means to discover and manage services is on the rise. However, services span both emerging microservices-based applications and legacy monolithic applications. Rather than adopting a service mesh that only runs on one platform, HashiCorp is opting for an open source service mesh that spans multiple platforms and is easier to deploy and manage than rival offerings such as Istio.

    Amith Nair, vice president of product marketing at HashiCorp, said that approach also makes it easier to deploy a service mesh at scale across multiple clouds and on-premises IT environments. Because Consul is designed to deployed on top of proxy servers such as Envoy or NGNIX, it can be deployed almost anywhere to manage services sprawl across the extended enterprise, noted Nair.

    As far as the adoption of service meshes are concerned, it is still early days. Many organizations are in the process of shifting away from managing applications to focusing on services that span multiple applications. Given all the dependencies that exist between various services, that shift represents a major challenge. A service mesh alleviates some of that challenge by providing a mechanism for both discovering and governing services that are increasingly interdependent.

    That approach also provides the added benefit of allowing teams tasked with governing and auditing IT environments to focus more on higher levels of abstractions versus updates to every line of code on which those services are constructed.

    For now, there are no standards, de facto or otherwise, in terms of service meshes. Many organizations may find themselves adopting multiple frameworks, which may lead to further advances in interoperability specifications such as the Service Mesh Interface between rival platforms.

    Less clear for now is who inside an IT organization will be responsible for acquiring and managing a service mesh. In some organizations it might be a network operations or cybersecurity team. In other organizations, those roles may have already been incorporated within a larger DevOps team.

    Regardless of the approach, the need for some type of service mesh is becoming more apparent. The good news is there is now no shortage of options. However, DevOps teams should note that in terms of overall complexity and amount of compute resources consumed, not all services meshes are the same.

    — Mike Vizard

  • HashiCorp unites open source DevOps tools with Atlas

    HashiCorp unites open source DevOps tools with Atlas

    Open source and DevOps go together like chocolate and peanut butter, or like milk and cookies (these metaphors are making me hungry). Basically, they’re inseparable and—while each is good in and of itself—they’re better when united. HashiCorp announced today that Atlas, a platform for a variety of leading open source tools, is now available to the general public to help organizations make DevOps even better.

    HashiCorp has a number of popular, industry-leading open source tools at its disposal. Vagrant manages development environments. Packer automates building artifacts like Docker containers, OpenStack images, and VMware images. Consul is a tool for runtime orchestration. Serf is a protocol used by Consul for failure detection and message distribution in a server cluster. Terraform automates infrastructure provisioning on cloud platforms like Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services. They’re all great tools in and of themselves, but Atlas ties them all together into a powerful, cohesive whole.

    Atlas has been available in beta for a while with tremendous success. Nodes under management consistently doubled month-to-month during the beta, and heavy hitters like Mozilla and Cisco jumped on board to test it out.

    DevOps seeks to accelerate development and deployment. One of the primary attributes of DevOps is automation to facilitate automatic, error-free, auditable implementation of routine, repeatable functions. Many organizations strive to embrace DevOps tools and principles and leverage open source tools like Consul or Vagrant but use manual, time-consuming, error-prone processes that are difficult to scale and challenging to manage effectively.

    HashiCorp believes that Atlas is the solution—a platform that brings it all together and enables organizations to manage end-to-end from configuration management to container deployments across multiple cloud environments. Each of the open source tools is fine alone, but the ability to manage and orchestrate them as a whole is very powerful.

    “We initially rolled our own solution for infrastructure CI and deployment. As the team grew, our homebrew solution struggled to centrally manage configuration, Terraform state, and access control,” said Chris Lonnen, Internal Tools and Systems Architect at Mozilla. “Atlas remedies all of these challenges for us and provides a beautiful interface for audit logs, infrastructure history, system-wide monitoring, and more. We’ve never lost 9s betting on a HashiCorp product.”

    According to the HashiCorp press release, you can start using the hosted version of Atlas as of today, but on-premise deployments of Atlas won’t happen until late 2015. If you want more information about on-premise Atlas you can sign up at this link: https://atlas.hashicorp.com. The development features like Vagrant box builds and hosting and Packer builds and artifact storage are free, and the first 10 nodes are free as well. Pricing is $40 per node per month beyond the first 10 nodes.