Announcing HCP Terraform Premium: Infrastructure Lifecycle Management at scale

Today, we’re excited to announce HCP Terraform Premium, now generally available to extend the capabilities of HCP Terraform, offering powerful features that enable organizations to scale their infrastructure automation securely and efficiently.

Enterprises looking to maximize their IT investments need solutions that can simplify operations, reduce risk, and optimize cost — all while meeting strict governance and compliance requirements. HCP Terraform Premium is designed to help enterprises with their Infrastructure Lifecycle Management at high scale and includes everything from the Standard and Plus plans, with additional features:

• Private VCS access: Access private VCS repositories securely by ensuring that your source code and static credentials are not exposed over the public internet.

• Private policy enforcement: Apply and enforce internal security and compliance policies within private cloud environments.

• Private run tasks: Integrate Terraform workflows with internal systems securely, creating a seamless automation pipeline that aligns with your internal processes and policies.

• Module lifecycle management – Revocation: Streamline module management by revoking outdated or vulnerable modules.

»Infrastructure Lifecycle Management key to scaling effectively

Terraform, as a part of HashiCorp’s solution to provide organizations with Infrastructure Lifecycle Management (ILM), provides a strategic approach to managing the full lifecycle of infrastructure from provisioning to deprecation and acts as the control plane for all infrastructure. HCP Terraform Premium is built to align with the stages of ILM, ensuring that your organization can manage infrastructure consistently, securely, and efficiently.

»Build consistently across all environments

Building infrastructure consistently using infrastructure as code (IaC) allows teams to codify, version, and provision infrastructure across various environments without reinventing the wheel. Organizations have challenges around optimizing DevOps operations with fragmented silos when there are different workflows for different environments.

»Private VCS access eliminates the need for public exposure

HCP Terraform Premium provides functionality for organizations’ operations to occur entirely within a customer's private cloud infrastructure, eliminating the need for public exposure and significantly reducing security risks. This allows customers to maintain full control over sensitive data and workflows involving Terraform operations regardless of whether teams are using public, private cloud, or hybrid environments.

For organizations with strict security controls, ensuring that your VCS provider is not accessible over the public internet is critical. HCP Terraform Premium offers private VCS access, ensuring that private VCS repositories can be securely accessed without exposing sensitive data to the public internet, addressing a key concern for enterprises looking to safeguard intellectual property stored in a VCS repository.

»Deploy policy-compliant infrastructure

Organizations need to implement guardrails to ensure compliance with organizational requirements before infrastructure is deployed. This involves the use of policy as code to enforce security, compliance, and cost-control conditions. HCP Terraform has a built-in policy engine, Sentinel, which allows teams to build automated policies that enforce security and compliance best practices in infrastructure.

HCP Terraform Premium extends this capability by enabling organizations to protect vital services from potential risks associated with public internet exposure and meet security requirements for certain organizations. With HCP Terraform Premium customers can enable more robust policy enforcement and maximize configuration best practices using a mix of both public and private information.

»Private policy enforcement

Compliance is non-negotiable at scale. Private policy enforcement gives organizations the ability to enforce policies within private cloud environments. It enables policy evaluations against private APIs of services hosted within an organization’s private network. This maintains data confidentiality by keeping policy-related interactions within private infrastructure.

»Private run tasks

Terraform run tasks are integrations that include third-party software actions at certain stages in the HCP Terraform run lifecycle, including:

• Security and code scanning,
• Cost controls
• Regulatory compliance

Private run tasks facilitate the execution of tasks integrated from private or self-managed services to allow automated interactions with internal systems without exposing them to the public internet.

»Manage infrastructure risks over time

Once infrastructure is provisioned, infrastructure must be continuously monitored, assessed, and remediated to uphold organizational standards and remain compliant throughout its lifecycle. In addition, managing Terraform operations can become complex and resource-intensive at scale. Meeting mission-critical SLAs typically requires dedicated teams to manage Terraform infrastructure.

With HCP Terraform Premium, organizations can streamline infrastructure management and achieve these high levels of product performance without the need to maintain a large, dedicated operations team. This reduces operational costs and allows teams to focus on their core business instead of managing Terraform infrastructure.

»Module lifecycle management – Revocation

Modules are the building block for reuse as organizations standardize IaC provisioning to gain control over cloud infrastructure. Managing modules at scale can be one of the most challenging aspects of infrastructure automation. Without proper tools to handle outdated or vulnerable modules, organizations risk running into security and compliance issues.

Over time there is a need to deprecate modules and replace them with updated versions. This requires:

• Visibility into where modules are being used
• A way to comment and then push a notification to end users
• A deprecation process

HCP Terraform provides these requirements in its module lifecycle management features, which we first introduced last October. HCP Terraform Premium adds module revocation, which continues to build on that vision.

Module lifecycle management introduces a systematic way to end the usage of modules by streamlining the deprecation process, improving communications, and reducing the operational overhead. The latest addition of revocation helps ensure that only compliant, up-to-date versions of modules are in use, while mitigating risks that arise when teams keep using deprecated modules. Deprecated modules will surface a warning to users, but the run will continue, allowing teams to address the issue without disruption. Revocation blocks new runs to gain control such that no new infrastructure is created with revoked modules.

This centralized management approach helps organizations uphold consistent infrastructure standards and streamline operations as they scale.

»The benefits of HCP Terraform Premium

Terraform provides organizations with a central control plane for all infrastructure. The powerful features of HCP Terraform Premium deliver tangible business benefits that help enterprises scale securely, reduce costs, and improve operational efficiency:

• Simplified operations: Adopting a single system of record for both private and public cloud resources gives teams better visibility into risks and the opportunity to streamline workflows, enhancing developer productivity.
• Improved security: By securing its connection to private VCS, HCP Terraform Premium reduces the risk of exposure to malicious attacks and keeps sensitive code and static credentials secure.
• Reduced TCO: With HCP Terraform Premium, you can meet your security and governance requirements without maintaining your own Terraform infrastructure or supporting a large infrastructure team. This lowers total cost of ownership (TCO), enabling your organization to focus on driving business value.

»Get started

HCP Terraform Premium is the solution for organizations looking to scale their Terraform usage securely and efficiently. Sign up for HCP Terraform and get started with our free trial and experience all features included in HCP Terraform Premium.