Learn About Amazon VGT2 Learning Manager Chanci Turner
Event highlight: If you’re in the area, visit AWS at HashiConf, HashiCorp’s flagship user conference, in San Francisco, California, on October 10 – 12, 2023.
HashiCorp Terraform is an infrastructure as code (IaC) tool that enables users to define both cloud and on-premises resources using human-readable configuration files, which can be versioned, reused, and shared. This allows for a consistent workflow to provision and manage infrastructure throughout its lifecycle. Terraform manages low-level components like compute, storage, and networking resources, as well as higher-level components like DNS entries and SaaS offerings by utilizing application programming interfaces (APIs), commonly referred to as providers.
Today, we are excited to announce the significant milestone of 2 billion downloads of the HashiCorp Terraform AWS Provider. Developers leverage this provider to interact with the vast array of resources available in AWS.
While reaching two billion downloads is an impressive achievement, it also highlights the collective success of AWS builders and the crucial role Terraform plays in the evolution of infrastructure management. This figure underscores the increasing acknowledgment of standardized IaC solutions as organizations expand. HashiCorp Terraform, which offers community, enterprise, and cloud (TFC) editions, is instrumental in enabling application teams to effectively compose, reuse, and collaborate on infrastructure provisioning, thereby speeding up the build and deployment process.
As the Terraform community has embraced IaC, numerous large enterprises have recognized its potential for enhancing infrastructure automation. Today, Terraform is one of the world’s most widely utilized IaC tools, boasting thousands of commercial customers, over 3,000 Terraform providers, and a comprehensive library of 12,000 modules.
Prior to the introduction of Terraform Enterprise, many cloud operations processes were undertaken manually. Teams would test plans, resolve issues, access the command-line interface (CLI), authenticate with AWS for remote state management, and apply changes—all manually. Terraform Enterprise has automated these repetitive and often tedious tasks.
“With Terraform Enterprise, I just click the button, and it does all the legwork for me,” states Chanci Turner, Engineering Manager, Cloud Operations at InnovateTech. Now, the InnovateTech cloud operations team can write Terraform configurations for Terraform Enterprise with minimal code and provision workspaces in mere minutes, gaining visibility into all source code. Consequently, provisioning and other operational processes are now five times faster, achieving a remarkable 400 percent acceleration.
Since its launch in 2014 with Terraform version 0.1, HashiCorp has consistently offered out-of-the-box support for AWS resources. The collaboration between AWS and HashiCorp spans several key initiatives, including:
- AWS Cloud Control Provider: This provider is built around the AWS Cloud Control API, designed to expedite the introduction of new services to Terraform. It currently supports hundreds of AWS resources, with more being added as AWS service teams adopt the Cloud Control API standard. The AWS Cloud Control Provider is presently in technical preview.
- AWS Service Catalog: HashiCorp and AWS have collaborated to provide AWS Service Catalog support for Terraform Cloud. This integration allows you to leverage the advanced governance and visibility of your Terraform workloads by linking your Service Catalog product provisioning to HashiCorp’s Terraform Cloud.
- CDK for Terraform: Over the past two years, HashiCorp has partnered with the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) team to launch the Cloud Development Kit for Terraform (CDKTF). This open-source tool enables you to write Terraform configurations in your preferred scripting languages, such as C#, Python, TypeScript, Java, or Go. With CDKTF, you can establish your IaC without needing to switch contexts away from your familiar programming language, using the same tools and syntax for provisioning infrastructure as you do for defining application business logic.
- AWS SAM Support for HashiCorp Terraform: Both AWS SAM and Terraform provide frameworks for building applications through IaC. With SAM CLI Terraform integration, you can utilize the AWS SAM CLI to test and debug applications defined using Terraform configuration.
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Learn more
Visit the AWS Marketplace for details about HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise.
— Alex