HashiCorp Terraform and AWS: re:Invent Caps Off a Big Year

The AWS re:Invent conference is hosting tens of thousands of cloud professionals in Las Vegas this week, and HashiCorp is there in full force with breakout sessions, expert talks, product demos, and more. But this huge event is merely another chapter in the ongoing relationship between HashiCorp and Amazon Web Services.

Yesterday, we recapped the highlights of HashiCorp’s zero trust security and networking on AWS over the past year. But for many organizations, HashiCorp Terraform is the preferred way to provision resources on AWS at scale. In this post, we are pleased to share many of the highlights of Terraform on AWS from this past year, including:

• One billion downloads of the AWS Terraform provider
• Cloud Development Kit for Terraform (CDKTF)
• Terraform AWS provider update
• Terraform launch day support at AWS re:Invent
• What’s next from HashiCorp Terraform and AWS

»1 Billion Downloads of the AWS Terraform Provider

2022 marked a significant milestone as the Terraform AWS provider surpassed one billion downloads. Earlier this month we took a moment to reflect on Terraform’s history, our current project collaboration with AWS, and the state of the Terraform AWS provider. As the download count tops 1.3 billion, AWS and HashiCorp continue to develop new integrations to help customers work faster, use more services and features, and enjoy developer-friendly ways to deploy cloud infrastructure.

»Terraform Announcements at HashiConf Global

This year, our HashiConf Global flagship conference featured inspirational and educational speakers from the HashiCorp community, product keynotes and roadmap sessions, and more. Specifically for Terraform, HashiConf Global 2022 emphasized continuous validation, no-code provisioning, native OPA support for Terraform Cloud, and other new features and key upgrades.

AWS supported and participated in HashiConf Global with a Platinum sponsorship and the company was featured in the breakout session Terraform AWS Cloud Control Provider – Under the Hood. The provider brings AWS resources to Terraform users even faster with a set of common APIs that enable Terraform users to use the latest AWS features and services, typically on the day of launch. This is a new way for Terraform users to integrate with new AWS services, and it can be used along with the main Terraform AWS provider.

»Cloud Development Kit for Terraform (CDKTF)

HashiCorp and the AWS Cloud Development Kit (AWS CDK) team partnered to develop and launch Cloud Development Kit for Terraform (CDKTF), an open source tool that provides a developer-friendly workflow for deploying cloud infrastructure with Terraform.

With CDKTF, developers can set up their infrastructure as code without context switching from their familiar programming language, using the same tooling and syntax to provision infrastructure resources as they’re using to define the application business logic. Teams can collaborate in familiar syntax, while still leveraging the power of the Terraform ecosystem and deploying their infrastructure configurations via established Terraform deployment pipelines.

In August, CDKTF reached the significant general availability milestone, and in November we released CDK for Terraform 0.14, which makes it easier to add and upgrade Terraform providers.

»Update on the Terraform AWS Provider

The HashiCorp Terraform AWS provider continues to expand with high-quality weekly releases supported by contributions from the community and AWS. We have merged nearly 3,000 pull requests and resolved more than 2,000 community issues this year.

The provider is ranked in the top 10 of company-led open source projects attracting the most contributors on GitHub, according to GitHub’s OCTOVERSE 2022, The State of Open Source Software.

New AWS services released this year for the HashiCorp Terraform AWS provider include Amazon OpenSearch Service, Network Manager, Amazon RDS Reserved Instances, Amazon Kendra, Amazon Comprehend, and Amazon Connect.

»Terraform Launch Day Support at AWS re:Invent

At re:Invent, AWS announced Launch Day support for new AWS services in the Terraform AWS provider, including:

RDS Blue/Green: Amazon RDS Blue/Green Deployments create a fully managed staging environment, or green environment, that allows you to deploy and test production changes, keeping your current production database (the blue environment) safe. Simply by setting a flag in Terraform, you can promote the staging environment (the green environment) to be the new production system.

Lambda SnapStart: A new opt-in AWS Lambda feature called SnapStart reduces startup latency for functions running on the Amazon Corretto Java 11 runtime. When SnapStart is enabled, function code is initialized once when a function version is published. Lambda then takes a snapshot of the memory and disk state of the initialized execution environment, persists the encrypted snapshot, and caches it for low-latency access.

ECS Service Connect: Amazon Elastic Container Service (Amazon ECS) launches a new networking capability called Service Connect that simplifies service discovery, connectivity, and traffic observability for Amazon ECS. Service Connect helps you build applications faster by letting you focus on the application code and not on your networking infrastructure.

»What’s Next From HashiCorp Terraform and AWS

AWS and HashiCorp continue to partner to bring AWS resources to Terraform users faster. Here’s what to expect.

The AWS Cloud Control (AWSCC) provider for Terraform mentioned earlier is a collaboration between AWS and HashiCorp, currently in technical preview. This provider is built around the AWS Cloud Control API and is automatically generated, which means new features and services on AWS can be supported right away. The AWS Cloud Control provider supports hundreds of AWS resources, with more support being added as AWS service teams adopt the Cloud Control API standard.

For Terraform users managing infrastructure on AWS, this new provider will be used alongside the existing AWS provider, which will continue to be the primary interface for AWS resources. The ability to automatically support new features and services allows this provider to increase the resource coverage and significantly reduce the time it takes to support new capabilities.

»Learn More About AWS and HashiCorp

Developers can use the Terraform AWS provider to interact with the many resources supported by AWS. To learn the basics of Terraform using this provider, follow the hands-on tutorials for getting started with Terraform on AWS on our developer education platform. Interact with AWS services, including Lambda, RDS, and IAM by following the AWS services tutorials.

If you’re attending AWS re:Invent, please stop by our booth (#3410) to chat with our technical experts, take in a product demo, and learn how companies are accelerating their cloud journey with HashiCorp and AWS.