Google Video Mini-series Featuring HashiCorp Products

Google Cloud Platform (GCP) is one of the public clouds supported by HashiCorp. GCP provides a rich set of services and features and is one of the core providers we dedicate resources to. Our focus being on testing, improving the performance of existing resources, and building support for new features.

GCP has differentiated themselves with their provisioning speed and consistency of Virtual Machines. This capability was super impressive to us and we wanted to put that to the test… and with that was born the Million Container Challenge with GCP and Nomad. The benchmark test scheduled 1,000,000 Docker containers on 5,000 hosts in under 5 minutes. GCP offers per-minute billing, ideal for microservices where resources are ephemeral. For example, a user may spin up runtime resources hundreds of times per hour but only pay for the time used, as opposed to paying for the entire hour.

Our work with GCP is key to deliver on our vision: any infrastructure for any application. We have teamed up with Google to build a set of four bite-size videos that discuss HashiCorp tools on GCP. The videos provide an introduction to the tools, demos, and steps to getting started.

The first video features an overview of the HashiCorp toolset and Google Cloud Platform presented by Kelsey Hightower, Staff Developer Advocate for the Google Cloud Platform, and Armon Dadgar, CTO and co-founder of HashiCorp. Google and HashiCorp released this video today.

In the next several weeks, we will showcase the remaining three videos in the series. Each video will focus on HashiCorp tools for practitioners and how they work with GCP.

HashiCorp Vagrant (Video #2)
Vagrant helps developers create and configure lightweight, reproducible, and portable development environments. The process is as simple as downloading and installing Vagrant, creating a single file for your project to describe the type of machine you want, the software that needs to be installed, and finally running a single command, "vagrant up", to let Vagrant stand up your complete development environment on GCP.

HashiCorp Packer (Video #3)
Packer is a tool that uses a single source configuration to create virtual machine and container images for multiple platforms, including Google Compute Engine.

HashiCorp Terraform (Video #4)
Terraform helps operators safely and predictably create, modify, and destroy production infrastructure. It codifies the GCP APIs into declarative configuration files that can be shared amongst team members, treated as code, edited, reviewed, and versioned. Operators can thus manage GCP resources spanning many products, a key requirement when provisioning scalable production infrastructure.

Please stay on the lookout for these on the YouTube, Google Cloud channel, or @HashiCorp on Twitter to find out when we publish each of these videos.