The days of the single cloud are numbered. Due to the increase in the amount of data, technology, and communication channels now available, today’s organizations possess a growing desire for greater business agility and cost-savings. To meet this need, companies are seeking out new and advanced technology options, including multi-cloud strategies.
A multi-cloud option, which refers to the use of multiple cloud services instead of just one service, brings businesses a host of benefits including higher resiliency, greater flexibility, and further control over their workloads and data. With these benefits in mind, it’s not surprising that as much as 85% of today’s enterprise IT corporations are looking to adopt a multi-cloud architecture by 2018, according to a report by IDC. But while working across different clouds on various platforms offers several advantages, without the proper planning in place, a multi-cloud option can present hurdles that can easily trip up teams.
To help organizations solve the challenges associated with moving to a multi-cloud option, HashiCorp, a leading cloud infrastructure automation company, offers a suite of solutions designed to enable enterprises to adopt, leverage, and make the most of their multi-cloud strategy with ease. SourceForge had the opportunity to connect with Jay Fry, HashiCorp’s of Head of Marketing, to discuss multi-cloud adoption and the benefits of utilizing this approach. Fry also shared some insight on HashiCorp’s innovative product suite and how it can act as the blueprint for organizations who are looking to adopt the cloud.
Q: Can you please provide us with a brief background on HashiCorp? When was the company established and what are the goals that drive the company?
A: Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar founded HashiCorp in 2012, noting that the data center of today and tomorrow looked very different from data center of yesterday. Today it includes a wide variety of technologies — physical, virtual, containers, public cloud, private cloud — large organizations have all of it.
Jay Fry, HashiCorp’s of Head of Marketing
Mitchell and Armon saw this heterogeneity and believed that the best, most pragmatic approach is to focus on the right workflows, not specific technologies. All our foundational technologies are open source and developed openly, with commercial offerings aimed to help larger, more complex enterprise environments.
Q: “Multi-cloud” is a term that has been generating buzz in the cloud computing market over the course of the last year. How would you directly define this term? And is it similar or different to a hybrid cloud environment?
A: While early cloud adoption was largely about building new applications on Amazon Web Services (AWS), today we see most enterprises relying on multiple cloud providers in addition to their private infrastructure. So, yes, their architecture is now a hybrid of public and private, of new and old. But, instead of “public” meaning only one vendor, the options have opened up quite a bit.
Q: What are the benefits of adopting a multi-cloud approach? Are there any specific challenges that enterprises should be prepared to face when they are moving to a multi-cloud environment?
A: The investments made by Microsoft, Google, Oracle, IBM, Alibaba, and others in their cloud offerings provide some pretty compelling infrastructure platforms. They each have unique value propositions, giving enterprises reasons to move new or existing workloads.
The primary challenge of cloud adoption is heterogeneity: how can operations, security, and development teams apply a consistent approach to provision, secure, connect, and run this infrastructure efficiently?
Q: According to the IDC report mentioned above, more than 85% of enterprise IT organizations will commit to a multi-cloud architecture by 2018. How can enterprises enjoy a successful and pain-free transition to a multi-cloud environment?
A: For most organizations, the move to the cloud means navigating the transition from a relatively static pool of homogeneous infrastructure in dedicated data centers to a distributed “fleet” of servers spanning one or more cloud providers. This means you have to rethink your approach to each layer of your infrastructure — your provisioning, you security approach, your application runtime, and how you connect this all together.
Q: Tell us a bit more about HashiCorp’s product suite. What are its standout features? How exactly do Hashicorp’s solutions help organizations provision, secure, run, and connect any infrastructure for any application?
A: The approach HashiCorp takes is to provide products at each layer of the infrastructure that are important for the cloud adoption efforts. In fact, the open source products have really broad adoption across enterprises — we had 22 million downloads last year — so much so that they are probably much better known than the company.
Terraform lets you provision infrastructure across any type of cloud or private environment. Vault is for secrets management, encryption, and identity & access management in a world where the “castle & moat” approach to security is no longer possible. Nomad is a scheduler for managing clusters of machines and the applications that run on them. Consul is for service discovery and configuration management in this new, dynamic world. You can use any of the products by itself or as part of the whole suite. They are all open source, with commercial versions that enable collaboration, governance, policy management, and multi-data center functionality.
Q: HashiCorp has some roots in the open source community. Why do you believe it is important for the company to contribute open-source based solutions? How have open-source projects transformed the cloud infrastructure automation industry?
A: HashiCorp is, has been, and always will be focused on building great open source tools. Our community is so important — it’s how the tools stay current, how they support the latest cloud services, and how they take into account the newest architectural approaches. The wide adoption of open source products has been a big driver in making cloud — and multi-cloud — possible. The simplicity and pragmatism of open source tools have helped add fuel to the fire, and that has sped up cloud adoption.
The broad adoption of our tools specifically is helping move huge numbers of workloads to all the cloud providers. This exposure and broad use have also really helped us accelerate our commercial business. That success, as Mitchell said at HashiConf, then lets HashiCorp put more investment back into the open source tools.
Q: Last month, Hashicorp announced major updates to the product suite. What has been the feedback thus far from customers?
A: At HashiConf, we saw lots of interest in the 1.0 version of Consul, the UI and new capabilities in Nomad, plus the Kubernetes support in Vault. But two things really stood out for our customers.
First, they really liked the new Terraform Module Registry and the addition of Workspaces and UI updates to Terraform Enterprise. With the Module Registry, anyone has access to both verified and community-created Terraform modules to give users an easy way to share templates for setting up and running their cloud-based infrastructure.
Second, we heard lots of interest in Sentinel, our new policy as code framework that we are integrating with each of our Enterprise products. It provides the guardrails for IT operations that make it less likely that they will make significant mistakes that impact business operations. Customers see this as a really useful addition and it is driving lots of interest in our Enterprise options.
Q: HashiCorp recently raised $40 million in Series C funding. In lieu of this, what can clients expect from Hashicorp in the coming months?
A: Our commercial customer base has grown quite significantly over the past 18 months. We see it as a big responsibility to help make sure those customers are successful. This funding will allow us to invest aggressively across the breadth of our organization — in engineering, in go-to-market functions, but most particularly with an emphasis on customer support and success. This will help us work closely with our customers as their work in the cloud continues to get more aggressive.
Q: Where do you see the cloud automation industry headed in the not-too-distant future?
A: As Mitchell noted in his keynote at HashiConf, we see policy as code as the next phase of infrastructure automation and the next mission for the company. Infrastructure as code was the first phase, which enables codification and automation for the four main components of infrastructure — core infrastructure, security, networking, and the application runtime. But infrastructure as code empowers more users to create and manage infrastructure — and with that power comes risks that less experienced users could make mistakes that could affect an organization’s business infrastructure.
This is why we created Sentinel — a policy as code framework that limits exposure by codifying business and regulatory policies. It ensures infrastructure changes are safe, and making organizations’ adoption of cloud more manageable.
Together, infrastructure as code and policy as code give organizations the power they need with the controls to make them feel comfortable. As far as technology shifts, we see the continued adoption of smaller and smaller units of applications — containerization — tied closely with the efforts organizations have underway to move to the cloud. These trends are in full force and are driving many of the IT ops and development decisions — and concerns — today. The efforts are going to continue to be around making all of this work in enterprises’ existing heterogeneous environments.
About HashiCorp
Based in San Francisco, HashiCorp is a leading cloud infrastructure automation company who seeks to help enterprises solve the challenges associated with adopting a multi-cloud approach. HashiCorp offers a suite of open source-based tools that lets organizations adopt consistent workflows to provision, secure, connect, and run any infrastructure for any application. Their award-winning products include Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, Vault, Consul, and Nomad.