How HashiCorp Waypoint Works with Terraform, Vault, and Consul

HashiCorp Waypoint is an application release orchestrator that enables developers to deploy, manage, and observe their applications on any infrastructure platform, including HashiCorp Nomad, Kubernetes, or Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS), with a few short commands.

At HashiConf Global last month, many developers discussed their use of multiple services from HashiCorp and were interested in connecting Waypoint to the rest of the HashiCorp stack.

In listening to this feedback, we wanted to highlight how to use Waypoint plugins for HashiCorp Terraform Cloud, Consul, and Vault to automate and simplify the application release process. By connecting to our other products (as well as many third-party tools), Waypoint optimizes an engineer’s workflow to enable teams to work faster. The plugins are available for HCP Waypoint (beta) and Waypoint open source.

»Waypoint Plugins Help Save Time

Typically, the infrastructure team needs to explicitly communicate configurations via GitHub (or some other method) to the application team as a part of the release process, which they copy into their code.

With the respective plugins, application developers can use a fixed piece of configuration to grab specific parameters set by the infrastructure team. This action removes the back-and-forth between teams that may be a point of failure or miscommunication during the CI/CD process.

For example, infrastructure engineers can create an Amazon ECS cluster using Terraform Cloud, and app teams can deploy it into that cluster without needing to copy-paste cluster names.

For a closer look at how to pull information into Waypoint, check out these code examples:

• Waypoint’s Terraform Cloud Config Sourcer Variable on GitHub
• Waypoint Node.js example on GitHub
• HashiCorp plugins:
  • Terraform Cloud
  • Consul
  • Vault

»Automate Your Application Delivery Workflow with Waypoint

Modern organizations often deploy applications to multiple cloud providers, an action that dramatically increases the complexity of releases. Multi-cloud or multi-platform environments force application developers to become familiar with those multiple platforms and the frequent, unexpected changes to them.

When managed the traditional way via script in a continuous integration process, the pipeline is brittle. Application developers find themselves needing to rely heavily on infrastructure teams for routine tasks like checking application health, deploying a specific version, or getting logs.

»Try HCP Waypoint with Your Team

The goal of Waypoint is to remove this dependency by automating how application developers build, deploy, and release software to a wide variety of platforms. The Waypoint plugins for Terraform, Vault, and Consul further this aim of automation by pulling in configuration details without relying so heavily on the infrastructure team.

No other application release platform offers these deep connections to the HashiCorp ecosystem tools and helps teams work faster and smarter. Just as important, Waypoint is a highly extensible platform that allows users to build their own plugins or use other plugins created by HashiCorp and our community. Over time we anticipate the number of Waypoint plugins will continue to grow.

Try HCP Waypoint for free to get started.