HashiCorp is anchoring its upgraded cloud platform locally in Europe with data centers in Germany and Ireland to comply with European regulations and provide better service.

HashiCorp announced during its HashiDays in London that it is expanding its cloud platform to Europe by opening two data centers in Dublin and Frankfurt. The local zones provide local data residency to meet security and compliance requirements, better service delivery for local applications, and lower operational costs for platform teams.

Infrastructure Cloud

HashiCorp will also fundamentally redesign its platform in the coming months. The goal is to integrate the various products and services under what it calls the “infrastructure cloud”. Terraform is the first in line and will be known from now on as HCP Terraform.

HashiCorp also adds some improvements to Terraform, including:

• HCP Terraform Agent: Advanced agents for cloud experiences with private data center networking.
• HCP Terraform Explorer: Improved visibility of managed resources with refined search filters and a documented API.
• Terraform provider-defined features: Flexibility and performance in the Terraform engine through custom features.
• AWS Cloud Control Provider for Terraform: Integrate with the AWS Cloud Control API for quick access to new AWS features.

Later, Waypoint, Packer and Vault, among others, will also become part of the HCP. HashiCorp announces the following security management improvements:

• HCP Vault Radar: Identifies whether secrets in source code have ever been stored in Vault to enable accurate risk prioritization.
• Automatic rotation of Vault Secrets: Automatic rotation of secrets, for example MongoDB and Twilio.
• Vault Workload Identity Federation: Exchanges identity tokens for credentials from external systems.
• Vault Secrets Synchronization: Centrally manage secrets for multiple external secret managers.
• Vault Secrets Operator for Kubernetes: Support for OpenShift and direct synchronization of changes in Vault with Kubernetes.
• Limit 0.16: Flexible session recording storage, custom resource aliases, and improved search capabilities for administrators.

Need for simplicity

According to a study by HashiCorp, companies need more simplicity in the cloud. Only eight percent have achieved a high level of operational maturity and 60 percent suffer from a shortage of skilled workers. “With our expansion into Europe and HCP Terraform, we are delivering new functions to support the entire lifecycle management of infrastructure and security in the cloud,” said CTO Armin Dadgar.