HashiCorp moves into cloud-ops managed services

HCP is analogous to MongoDB Atlas in that it will provide a cloud-based service offering ‘push-button' access to the company's products via a single control plane, CTO says

HashiCorp, the open-source cloud infrastructure software company, has announced the private beta of HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP), a managed services platform with multi-cloud capabilities.

This marks a shift in direction from the company's current model of providing downloadable software.

"There's a funny irony about HashiCorp in that we're a cloud infrastructure company on one hand, but we sell desktop software on the other," noted Armon Dadgar, co-founder and CTO during a media call, saying this has been in the works for two years now.

HCP is starting small, with just one product Consul, the service networking, platform, running on one cloud AWS. HCP Consul will offer secure service networking across EKS, EC2 and other AWS application environments. Consul will be followed on AWS by Vault, the passwords, certificates and tokens store, with Terraform and Nomad to follow at some stage. HCP will also be compatible with Azure and Google Cloud platform, although Dadgar was unsure on the actual timing of any releases, save to say this is being worked on behind the scenes.

Dadgar said HCP is analogous to MongoDB Atlas in that it will provide a cloud-based service offering ‘push-button' access to the company's products via a single control plane.

The company already offers hosted versions of some of its products on the major public clouds, but these are available as part Azure and AWS subscriptions rather than as a layer on top of those platforms, he explained. There will be no change to these services.

HCP will allow HashiCorp to manage the cloud infrastructure for its customers, who pay for this service on-demand.

"These services are in the runtime path of applications, so they must be running all the time," noted CEO Dave McJannet, saying that handing over operations to HashiCorp can relieve the burden on the ops team. It will also allow the company to offer a consistent workflow on any cloud, McJannet added.

"As a multi-product company, we are building a common scaffolding to plug in all of our products over time."

The HPC-based applications are deployed inside the customer's virtual private cloud (VPC) in a single-tenant model.

At its virtual event HashiConf Digital today, the firm also announced an updated version of TerraForm. Version 0.13 comes with additions to its confirmation language syntax, enhanced connectivity with the Terraform Provider Registry and custom variable validation as a production-ready feature.

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