News

HashiCorp Announces Free Tier for Terraform SaaS

With the creation of a free SaaS tier for Terraform, small teams can now use a cloud-based service to store state, acquire locks, and ensure there's only one Terraform application running at no extra cost.

Speaker

  • Armon Dadgar
    Armon DadgarCo-founder & CTO, HashiCorp

Transcript

With the release of Terraform 0.12, what we really tried to do was listen to the Terraform community to understand the challenges of using Terraform. So with releases 0.1 through 0.11, it's been a focus on feature completeness, richness, and more providers. And now we wanted to step back and really understand what's next for Terraform. What's on the frontier of problems?

One thing we heard loud and clear was the need for more expressive language, and that's coming in the form of HCL2 with 0.12, but the other thing that we also heard loud and clear was the need for users to be able to collaborate around Terraform.

The moment I have multiple users using Terraform, how do they do that effectively, safely, and without having to build custom workflows? This has always been a problem we've focused on within Terraform Enterprise, looking at how the largest organizations—the global 2000s, the Fortune 500s—solve this problem.

But it became clear that this is a problem that also exists on a much smaller scale; the moment I have two people using Terraform. Looking at that problem, it became clear that we need to consider collaboration as a core workflow of Terraform itself. The moment we have multiple users, how do they work together without stepping on each other's toes?

So what we're excited to announce is the availability of a Terraform free tier which allows users to offload both state management and locking outside of a problem that they have to solve, or stitch together multiple tools, to one where we natively solve it as an integrative part of Terraform. So all users are eligible to sign up for a free tier, create a free account, and then your workspace can be configured to automatically use the cloud-based service to store state, acquire locks, and ensure there's only one Terraform application happening at any given time.

What this really lets you do is have a team of people start to collaborate with each other without worrying that they're going to lead to loss of state files, corruption of that, or step on each other's toes and make multiple changes concurrently. All of that gets baked in as part of the native Terraform experience.

As part of the free tier, there are a bunch more exciting features we're looking forward to announcing, but starting with the collaboration problem specifically and focusing there.

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