Hashicorp: Keep Your Workflow Portable No Matter the Cloud Workload

Cloud providers are clamoring for our business, and they each make convincing arguments. Databases that scale, serverless architecture, fully-integrated toolkits for apps. There is a lot to draw our attention.

But the goal of developers and engineers isn't to stay on top of the newest technology, or devise ways to re-tool an application to fit a new paradigm. We should be comfortable building an application once, and using the right tools for the job, whatever the cloud platform.

HashiCorp is a company that saw this reality long ago, and started building tools that helps developers do just that. The future is not AWS, of Google Cloud, or Azure, or Linode. It's all of them and more. It's multi-cloud. As developers, the only way we can succeed in that future is having a common set of tools that allow us to bridge the gap between all of these platforms.

Yeah. So yeah, that's an important part of the way we view multi-cloud. One of the first things I tell anyone that is adopting Terraform for the first time is ... They read CloudFormation, but for anything or they read something like that somewhere on the Internet and they think, "Oh, this is the right once run anywhere dream." But I make it really clear, and I'm going to make it clear right now that it's not that. Like the Terraform you write is AWS specific, or Azure specific, or Google specific. You cannot rerun that and target a different cloud platform. That's not what we're doing. That would be workload portability. What we're doing is workflow portability.
 

So any configure write for any cloud, it's always the same command to create it, the same command to see what would happen, the same structure to investigate for cost analysis, things like that. It's higher level than the actual tech itself.

That's Michell Hashimoto, CTO of HashiCorp, talking to Corey Quinn on his podcast Screaming in the Cloud.

I applaud the efforts of cloud providers to create APIs and tools to facilitate deployment and maintenance. There are some amazing tools out there, and ... some really confusing console experiences. But learning new tools often has a cost, in time and focus. We can work faster and more easily by using one set of tools that offers flexibility and fluency across the cloud environment.

Vagrant is surely one of HashiCorp's more well-known products. It creates development environments that are consistent across OS's and a more reliable reflection of production systems than many other alternatives.

Terraform is the swiss-army knife of multi-cloud deployment. It doesn't seek to ignore the differences between different cloud platforms, but it aims to reduce the cognitive burden we bear for keeping them straight.

Vault, Consul and Nomad, are the company's other products that aim even higher. If the future looks more like containers and micro-services, then this the kind of software we should all hope to be using.