A look back at some of the most important moments of a very eventful 2021 for HashiCorp.

HashiCorp 2021 Year in Review

As we officially enter the public markets, we plan to continue to do what we think we do best: solving problems for our end users.

A New Chapter for HashiCorp

A look back at some of the major moments in 2020 for HashiCorp

HashiCorp 2020 Year in Review

It’s a tradition for us to close out the year with some reflection on the progress we have made. As we mark the close of a significant year, we note that it’s been an exciting year for HashiCorp with many appropriately significant milestones.

HashiCorp 2019 Year in Review

As we approach the end of 2018, it is a good opportunity to reflect on the past year. It’s been an exciting year for HashiCorp, with many milestones. We’d like to take a moment to thank our users, customers, partners, and employees for making it possible. 

There are many things we could highlight, but in the interest of keeping things brief, here are a few that we’ve chosen.

2018 Year In Review

Today at HashiConf 2018 in San Francisco, we are announcing major updates across our entire suite of open source and enterprise products. Our mission is to allow users to run applications on any infrastructure, cloud or on-premises, using a modern infrastructure as code approach. This blog is a summary of the announcements being made at the event.

HashiCorp Product Announcements at HashiConf 2018

HashiCorp hosted HashiDays from June 25 to June 27 in Amsterdam. It is a three-day, deeply technical, and community-focused event. HashiDays brings together customers, practitioners, as well as HashiCorp employees to explore and discuss different areas and topics ranging from customer stories and use cases, to technical product exploration and trainings.

HashiDays Amsterdam 2018 Recap

Learn why secrets management strategies need to involve automatically generated, updated, and revoked credentials.

Why We Need Dynamic Secrets

HashiCorp advocates for "infrastructure as code" approaches to managing infrastructure. We have talked about it publicly and published about it in our  Tao of HashiCorp. At HashiConf 2017, we announced Sentinel, a framework for "policy as code". The same coding practices that are applied to infrastructure can be very effective in enforcing and managing policies. Codifying policy removes the need for ticketing queues, without sacrificing enforcement.

Why Policy as Code?

As organizations adopt one or more public clouds they are faced with the challenge of securely providing access to secret material, such as usernames and passwords, API tokens, encryption keys, and TLS certificates. This problem is known as secret management, and there are several primary challenges including authentication, authorization, auditing, and supporting a diverse set of environments, clients, and end systems.

Brokering Cloud Identity

As we close out the year, we wanted to reflect on our amazing progress this year. In just the last year, we’ve gone from around 60 people with a majority in engineering, to over 160 across all groups. We’ve shipped more open source releases than in any previous years, delivered four commercial products, raised a $40M Series C, announced major partnerships, and added over a hundred new customers. And this list is only a subset of the last year!

2017 Year in Review

Today at HashiConf 2017 in Austin, Texas, we announced major updates and new features across our entire suite of open source and enterprise products, including HashiCorp Terraform, HashiCorp Vault, HashiCorp Consul, and HashiCorp Nomad. In addition to these product updates, we announced the release of Sentinel, our new policy as code framework that integrates across the Enterprise product suite, and the Terraform Module Registry, which provides example infrastructure templates to make provisioning across cloud environments easier, and so much more.

HashiCorp Announcements at HashiConf 2017

Nomad v0.5.3 introduced parameterized jobs which act as job scaffolds that can be dispatched on demand with configurable arguments. These jobs behave similar to functions, encapsulating the logic and allowing the caller to name the job and provide appropriate arguments. Nomad Dispatch treats those &amp;quot;function calls&amp;quot; like a future or promise, making it easy to build scalable processing pipelines for operations like video transcoding, image resizing, sending emails, or doing a billing rollup.
This blog post explores using the new Nomad Dispatch feature to build a video transcoding service using the popular open source tool ffmpeg. Traditional approaches to this problem often involve many different components for work queuing, scheduling, capacity planning, and failure handling. Due to its design, Nomad automatically handles these concerns, allowing for focus on a minimal job definition and the business logic of the video transcoding service.

Replacing Queues with Nomad Dispatch

2016 was an astonishing year at HashiCorp, and I want to take a moment to reflect and share our story with you.

2016 Year in Review

Today we are excited to formally release DevOps Defined, a guide for adopting DevOps to accelerate application delivery. Two years ago we published our Tao of HashiCorp, in which we detailed the design principles and philosophy behind our tools. Since then we have launched several new open source projects including Vault and Nomad which follow the Tao. It has been an extremely useful resource for giving our technology a shared direction.
However, technology is just one aspect software development. Software organizations are composed of people, processes, and technology. While it's easy to focus on just the technology, it is ultimately just an enabler of successful people and process. Thus, it's important to understand the workflows and productivity of the people that power software organizations. Our organizations should be designed to align teams through empowering workflows. To us, that is the essence of DevOps.

HashiCorp, DevOps, and the Application Delivery Process

We are proud to host our second annual HashiConf US in Napa, California. HashiConf is an opportunity to gather our global user community to discuss where we have been, where we are going, and how HashiCorp DevOps tools can be used to solve the infrastructure challenges of today.

Our development, operations, and security tools have been adopted by a range of companies, from startups to large enterprises and governments. As organizations build mission critical applications around our tools, it is important for us to invest responsibly to maintain stable growth.

Today at HashiConf we are excited to announce $24 million in Series B financing, alongside updates to our tools and the general availability of Vault Enterprise.

HashiConf 2016 Announcements

Today we announce Nomad, a cluster manager and scheduler designed for microservices and batch workloads. Nomad is distributed, highly available, and scales to thousands of nodes spanning multiple datacenters and regions.

Nomad provides a common workflow to deploy applications across an infrastructure. Developers use a declarative job specification to define how an application should be deployed and the resources it requires (CPU, memory, disk). Nomad accepts these jobs and finds available resources to run them. The scheduling algorithm ensures all constraints are satisfied, and packs as many applications on a host as possible to optimize resource utilization. Additionally, Nomad supports virtualized, containerized, or standalone applications running on all major operating systems giving it the flexibility to support a broad range of workloads.

Nomad is now being deployed in production environments and we are proud to share it publicly. We are excited about the future of the project, and are just beginning to build on the foundation that it provides.

Read on to learn more.

HashiCorp Nomad

We are proud to announce the release of Vault 0.2.
Vault is a tool for managing secrets. From storing credentials and API keys to
encrypting sensitive data, Vault is meant to be a solution for all secret
management needs.
The initial public release of Vault was almost two months ago and we have
been busy extending the core capabilities, adding new secret and storage
backends, improving user experience, and fixing bugs.
Vault 0.2 brings many new features including key rotation, rekeying, a PKI secret backend for dynamic certificate generation, a Cassandra secret backend, many new storage backends, and derived unique per-transaction keys for the transit backend. There are so many amazing changes that we  cannot possibly list them here, so please see the full Vault 0.2 CHANGELOG
for more details.
You can download Vault 0.2 from the
project website.
Read on to learn more about the major new features in Vault 0.2.

HashiCorp Vault 0.2

We are proud to release Consul 0.5. Consul is a datacenter runtime that provides many of the capabilities needed to run a modern datacenter, such as service discovery, configuration, and orchestration. It's designed to be distributed and highly available and proven to scale to thousands of nodes and services across multiple datacenters.

The last major release of Consul was several months ago and it's incredible stability has allowed us to focus on adding major new features, improving the user experience, and fixing bugs.

Consul 0.5 brings many new features including automated clustering, seamless UI integration via Atlas, enhanced ACLs, simple N+1 deploys, node and service maintenance modes, native HTTP health checks, ephemeral keys, session TTLs, and key rotation among many others.

You can download Consul 0.5 here or view the changelog

Read on to learn more about the major new features in 0.5.

HashiCorp Consul 0.5

Vagrant Cloud is a service provided by HashiCorp, and powers a number of features for Vagrant that cannot be done without a server component. One of it's paid features is box hosting, allowing Vagrant boxes to be hosted and managed in Vagrant Cloud. We had received several reports that uploading very large Vagrant boxes would fail reliably, and we spend part of last week resolving this issue. We use S3 as one of our backing stores, and eventually it was discovered that S3 limits the size of a single upload to 5GB.

Atomic Multi-Part S3 Uploads with Consul

Today we are proudly releasing Consul 0.4. Consul is a solution for service discovery, configuration, and orchestration. Consul is completely distributed, highly available, and scales to thousands of nodes and services across multiple datacenters.

Consul 0.3 was released two months ago and we've been busy fixing bugs, making improvements, and adding new features.

The major new features added include a fine-grained ACL system, a watch mechanism to invoke callbacks on changes, an event system for custom events such as deploys or service restarts, and remote execution for simplified administration.

Consul 0.4 can be downloaded here, and the full changelog can be viewed here.

Read on to learn more about the major new features in 0.4.

HashiCorp Consul 0.4

Consul provides both a DNS and HTTP interface for doing service discovery. This works for broad set of uses, but latency sensitive or high-throughput applications can benefit from reducing the overhead of service discovery by using a client-side load balancer such as HAProxy.

Using consul-haproxy makes it incredibly simple to provide a configuration template for HAProxy and have it dynamically populated based on service information from Consul. This allows HAProxy to be updated seamlessly with zero downtime. While this approach requires a prior configuration, it also reduces the per-request overhead of service discovery.

HAProxy with Consul

The Twelve-Factor App says that web applications should retrieve their configuration from environmental variables. This practice has been rapidly adopted by modern PaaS services to enable simple configuration changes.

With Consul, it is simple to bring this practice to your own datacenters. If you use a PaaS for some aspects of your infrastructure but not all of it, Consul is a great way to centralize configuration data.

In this post, we show how Consul and envconsul can be used to set configuration values and trigger automatic restarts on configuration changes, all without any modifications to your applications.

Twelve-Factor Applications with Consul

Today we announce Consul, a solution for service discovery and configuration. Consul is completely distributed, highly available, and scales to thousands of nodes and services across multiple datacenters.

Some concrete problems Consul solves: finding the services applications need (database, queue, mail server, etc.), configuring services with key/value information such as enabling maintenance mode for a web application, and health checking services so that unhealthy services aren't used. These are just a handful of important problems Consul addresses.

Consul solves the problem of service discovery and configuration. Built on top of a foundation of rigorous academic research, Consul keeps your data safe and works with the largest of infrastructures. Consul embraces modern practices and is friendly to existing DevOps tooling.

Consul is already deployed in very large infrastructures across multiple datacenters and has been running in production for several months. We're excited to share it publicly.

Read on to learn more.