HashiConf US 2018 Highlights

HashiConf is organized every year by HashiCorp, the company behind Vault, Terraform, and Vagrant.The Instruqt team was present during HashiConf US in San Francisco. Our founder Erik Veld gave a talk on how we power our Arcade machines with Terraform. Fun fact: he actually presented his talk on an arcade machine on stage. Once the video is available, I will update this blogpost.

Powering Arcade Machines with Terraform - Speaker Deck

During the conference, HashiConf announced a number of product updates. Let’s take a look at what I think were the most interesting announcements.

Vault 1.0 Preview

Vault is used to centrally manage secrets to enforce access to applications, systems, and data. New in Vault 1.0 is the Auto Unseal capability, that allows users to automate Vault without having to manually unseal the Vault. Fun fact: Kelsey Hightower, Developer Advocate at Google, promised he would wear a Vault t-shirt for a month. Good luck, Kelsey :)

Terraform 0.12

One of the most exciting announcements is the HCL enhancement in Terraform 0.12. We use Terraform extensively in our platform, and we write a lot of Golang code to work around the limitations of HCL. With Terraform 0.12, our code will be drastically simplified. Thank you HashiCorp!If you’re brave enough, you can download Terraform 0.12 alpha already

Kubernetes as a first-class citizen

Another big improvement is the adoption of Kubernetes as a first-class citizen. Up until now, the Kubernetes provider was always a few versions running behind. With Terraform 0.12, we don’t have to use unofficial Terraform providers any more, but we can rely on the official Kubernetes provider.

Learn HashiCorp

With Instruqt, you can create interactive tutorials for technology. But good quality is really important for a good learning experience. HashiCorp invested a lot of time and effort into launching learn.hashicorp.com. It’s a great resource if you’re just getting started with their products. And of course, if you would like to increase your hands-on skills, visit the HashiCorp tutorials on Instruqt.