Terraform AWS provider tops 3 billion downloads

The Terraform AWS provider, which just celebrated its 10-year anniversary, has now surpassed three billion downloads.

While three billion downloads add up to a historic milestone, AWS and HashiCorp continue to develop new integrations to help customers work faster, use more services and features, and provide developer-friendly ways to deploy cloud infrastructure. Here are some of the initiatives that we have been partnering on:

• AWS and HashiCorp strategic collaboration agreement
• Infrastructure Lifecycle Management (ILM) on AWS
• AWSCC provider is now GA

»AWS and HashiCorp strategic collaboration agreement

Earlier in June, in partnership with AWS, HashiCorp agreed to co-develop a comprehensive set of Terraform policies to provide expert guidance on architecting, configuring, and operating on AWS. These policies will enforce compliance with standards such as CIS, HIPAA, FINOS, and the AWS Well-Architected Framework.

This joint effort is intended to help customers implement infrastructure and security lifecycle management, accelerate time-to-value, mitigate implementation risk, and provide a framework to address outcome-driven use cases surrounding security and compliance.

»Infrastructure Lifecycle Management on AWS

Earlier this year, HashiCorp launched The Infrastructure Cloud, an approach powered by HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) to unify Infrastructure Lifecycle Management (ILM) and Security Lifecycle Management (SLM) on one platform. The ILM side of The Infrastructure Cloud gives platform teams the systems they need to build, deploy, and manage infrastructure throughout its entire lifecycle. HCP’s ILM products enable teams to enforce policies, boost productivity, sharpen visibility, and remove unneeded resources.

ILM on AWS includes three stages:

»Build

The first step of effective ILM involves establishing a systematic and repeatable approach to creating infrastructure. HashiCorp Terraform lets you define AWS resources in human-readable configuration files that you can version, reuse, and share. Terraform creates and manages resources on AWS through their APIs, using plugins known as providers. Defining infrastructure as human-readable code makes it easier to build, change, and version AWS resources safely and efficiently.

»Deploy

In the next stage of effective ILM, organizations focus on taking configurations shared among teams and converting them into standard workflows and modules so those configurations can be reused as part of a larger cloud platform. HashiCorp and AWS have collaborated to provide the ability to trigger industry best-practice account creation via Terraform, using the Control Tower Account Factory for Terraform . These account creations incorporate security and cost-centric policies to limit unneeded and insecure infrastructure.

»Manage

In the last stage, organizations expand the infrastructure as code provisioning workflow to include all environments. To do this, platform teams need to ensure their infrastructure upholds organizational requirements over time by effectively detecting and remediating changes. AWS and HashiCorp jointly announced the integration between AWS Service Catalog and HCP Terraform (formerly Terraform Cloud), allowing customers to use AWS Service Catalog as a single tool to organize, govern, and distribute their HCP Terraform configurations within AWS at scale. This integration adds advanced governance and visibility into those Terraform workflows.

»AWSCC provider is now GA

Built around the AWS Cloud Control API and designed to bring new services to HashiCorp Terraform faster, the AWS Cloud Control (AWSCC) provider is now generally available. The 1.0 release of the AWSCC provider represents another step forward in our effort to offer launch-day support for AWS services. The Terraform AWS Cloud Control provider is automatically generated based on the Cloud Control API published by AWS, which means the latest features and services on AWS can be supported right away. The AWSCC provider gives developers access to several new AWS services, including such as AWS Billing Conductor, AWS Chatbot, Amazon Personalize, Amazon Q Business, and more.

The AWSCC provider is a great complementary provider to add to your existing Terraform configurations that use the standard AWS provider. Given its ability to automatically support new features and services, this AWSCC provider can will increase resource coverage and significantly reduce the time it takes to support new capabilities.

»Learn more about AWS and HashiCorp

Developers can use the Terraform AWS provider to interact with the many resources supported by AWS. To learn the basics of Terraform using this provider, follow the hands-on tutorials for getting started with Terraform on AWS on our developer education platform. Interact with AWS services, including AWS Lambda, Amazon RDS, and AWS IAM by following the AWS services tutorials.

If you are currently using Terraform Community Edition or are completely new to Terraform, sign up for HCP Terraform and get started using the Free offering today.