Cloud Neutral DevOps
HashiCorp makes some of our favorite DevOps tools. Along with being feature rich, stable, and well designed, they are cloud neutral. This allows DevOps teams to become experts with a single tool without having to get locked in to a single cloud vendor. Some cloud neutral tools try to completely abstract the cloud provider and the services available. This forces the user to only use the ‘lowest common denominator’ of services available from all supported providers. With Terraform, HashiCorp has not fallen into this trap. They embrace the rich set of services available from each provider, with different services supported for different clouds. This allows us to put the right workload in the right cloud, without the need to leverage multiple tools, or build multiple deployment pipelines.
Terraform Supports AWS Inspector
It would be expected, however, that Terraform would trail the cloud providers’ proprietary tools supporting new cloud products and features. But HashiCorp is amazingly quick to support features. A great example is v 0.8.5, which now supports AWS’ Inspector service. As of the publishing of this post, AWS’ own CloudFormation tool still does not have support for Inspector. Pretty amazing for a small company offering an open source product!