HashiConf Global 2021 Delivers Deep Learning for Practitioners

Earlier this week, our virtual HashiConf Global conference welcomed more than 12,000 online attendees from more than 100 countries to two days packed full of product announcements, hands-on technical labs, product demos, lightning talks, and countless more networking and technical conversations.

More than 45 expert speakers delivered dozens of sessions across three tracks, and for the next week, you can watch them all via the On Demand tab at the HashiConf Global 2021 site. After October 29, most of the sessions will be available on demand on the HashiCorp YouTube Channel and the HashiCorp Resource Library (where some specific talks will also have transcripts).

That’s a lot to take in, so we asked two experts — our HashiConf Global 2021 emcees, Developer Advocates Rosemary Wang and Taylor Dolezal — to share some of the sessions they found most useful to practitioners. Not surprisingly, the keynote sessions on Day 1 (where HashiCorp Co-Founder Mitchell Hashimoto announced the public beta of HCP Packer) and Day 2 (in which HashiCorp Co-Founder and CTO Armon Dadgar introduced HashiCorp Consul 1.11 beta and the Consul API Gateway) topped their lists.

»Day 1 Opening Keynote

»Day 2 Opening Keynote

But that’s only the beginning of what practitioners can learn from HashiConf Global 2021. Rosemary and Taylor also highlighted these six sessions that practitioners won’t want to miss:

»Terraform Roadmap

Paul Hinze, HashiCorp Vice President, Engineering, brings you up to date on where HashiCorp Terraform is today and what to look for in the future. For example, Paul breaks down how visualization enhancements to Terrraform’s Workspace page can help you save time when dealing with error messages. Don’t miss his explanation of how the power of the CDK for Terraform lets you work in your preferred programming language if you don’t want to use HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL).

»Consul Roadmap

Preetha Appan, Senior Director of Consul Engineering and Neena Pemmarajul, Director of Product, Consul, blast off with a fictional space exploration company as it uses the HashiCorp Consul product suite to build unified workflows for improved application delivery and consistent security, while extending connectivity to applications everywhere. And they offer hints at what’s in the Consul pipeline, including managed services across multiple cloud service providers, mesh federations, and simplified deployments.

»The Future of HCP Packer

Megan Marsh, the Engineering Lead for Packer, demos the beta of the HCP Packer registry, a multi-cloud image gallery that bridges image factories and image deployments, and creates image management workflows for development and security teams so they can track how images are used across deployments. She also shares insights into the product’s future evolution, focusing on centralized governance, auditing, automation capabilities.

»Real-World Waypoint with Kubernetes

Principal Engineer Evan Phoenix demos deploying Kubernetes in production using Waypoint, focusing on true-to-life usage, including integration with Terraform Cloud for service access information, building container images within the Kubernetes cluster, and monitoring the resources. The demo covers deployment validation, autoscaling, and multi-environment production and staging.

»It’s Terraform All the Way Down

Phil Sautter, Product Lead, Terraform providers, announces general availability of the Kubernetes Manifest Resource, and shares details on a number of projects — from HashiCorp and from the community — that demonstrate why Terraform is the ideal tool for managing Kubernetes clusters and configuring and managing your workloads inside those clusters.

»Tech-Nomadic >> Run Your Software Anywhere

Join Developer Advocate Erik Veld for a fun exploration of how to run a wide variety of workloads, not just containers, via Nomad — including Minecraft!

»Many More Sessions

Of course, that’s just a taste of the full HashiConf Global 2021. Until October 29, the entire event is available on the conference site under the On Demand tab. After that, check out the HashiCorp YouTube channel and the HashiCorp Resource Library for videos and transcripts.

And for more information on what happened at HashiConf Global 2021, check out these HashiConf blog posts and press articles:

• Introducing the Consul API Gateway — HashiCorp blog
• Announcing HashiCorp Consul 1.11 Beta — HashiCorp blog
• Announcing the Public Beta of HCP Packer — HashiCorp blog
• HashiCorp’s latest product updates simplify multicloud networking — SiliconAngle
• HashiConf Global: What’s on the roadmap for Terraform — IT Ops Times
• HashiCorp cozies up to Azure AD for zero-trust security

Finally, we want to extend a big thanks to all the people who worked on, spoke at, attended, or contributed to HashiConf Global 2021, both on camera and behind the scenes. We’re already working on HashiConf 2022, which we hope to hold in person as well as online. See you there!