HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise Beta

We're pleased to announce the release of the new HashiCorp Terraform Enterprise Beta. Terraform Enterprise provides collaboration and governance features to safely and predictably codify, plan, and provision any infrastructure for any application. This release includes major new features and improvements.

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The new Terraform Enterprise Beta adds major new functionality to Terraform Enterprise. Highlights include:

• Workspaces replace Environments
• New User Interface
• Comprehensive API coverage
• Policy as Code support with Sentinel

»Workspaces replace Environments

With Terraform Enterprise Beta, we have replaced Environments with Workspaces. The “Environment” terminology was confusing because it did not align with organizations' models of an infrastructure environment and use of concepts like dev, staging, and prod. Large organizations often split up those large environments, such as prod, into smaller infrastructure components such as prod-networking, prod-app1, prod-monitoring.

Workspaces are a more flexible unit of organization that can map to the complexity of an organization's use of Terraform. A common trend is to break down monolithic infrastructure into smaller Workspaces that specific teams can delegate and manage. This is similar to the trend to split monolithic applications into smaller microservices, which are independently developed and managed.

Workspaces define the settings, Terraform configuration, and Terraform state for an infrastructure component.

»New User Interface

Terraform Enterprise Beta introduces users to a new interface design that is modern, fast, and responsive to improve the user experience. The new user interface is designed for practitioners — the users who operate the organization’s infrastructure, manage Workspaces, and execute Runs.

In particular, we made a few key usability improvements:

• Navigation has improved to put the latest run front and center, letting you edit variables and navigate through Workspace settings.

• From the Workspace list, you can view all Workspaces, their most recent run status, last update time, environment attribute, and the repository source.

• The new run details timeline view makes key information available at your fingertips. Easily navigate to the configuration, view Terraform plan and apply logs, and approve and apply planned changes.

• Organization and Workspace settings have been redesigned to make getting started easier while maintaining the fine granularity of the settings.

The following demo shows the workflow to collaborate on infrastructure using the new UI and Workspaces.

»Comprehensive API Coverage

Terraform Enterprise Beta adds comprehensive API coverage and documentation. In the previous releases of Terraform Enterprise only a subset of features were available via the APIs. With the new Terraform Enterprise Beta, we took an API-first design approach and made all GUI operations driven by the same APIs available to users.

The comprehensive API coverage greatly improves integration with existing investments in tools and services. Customers who use tools for provisioning IT resources will be able to integrate with Terraform Enterprise Beta to programmatically manage Workspaces, teams, and access control. Engineering teams using CI/CD services like Jenkins can push configurations, trigger Terraform plans and applies, and get status via the API to integrate with their existing CI/CD pipeline.

Learn more about the Terraform Enterprise Beta API by reading the documentation.

»Policy as Code support with Sentinel

Enterprise-Only Feature: This feature requires Terraform Enterprise Premium

Sentinel, a policy as code framework for cloud infrastructure automation, helps organizations accelerate cloud adoption by setting policy guardrails for provisioning resources via Terraform Enterprise.

Large organizations want to enable their individual teams to independently provision and run their application however it becomes necessary for a central IT team to provide some constraints. A policy owner can define the Sentinel Policies to be applied to all resources provisioned via Terraform Enterprise across their organization. These policies are embedded into the provisioning workflow and enforced between a Terraform plan and Terraform apply. Before any resources are created, destroyed, or modified, the Terraform Plan will be verified to be in compliance with the policies. The policy owner can create policies that:

• do not allow resources to be provisioned without tags
• restrict which types of cloud resources can be provisioned
• enforce secure defaults for network ingress/egress rules

Learn more about Sentinel by reading the documentation.

»Accesing Terraform Enterprise Beta

Terraform Enterprise Beta is available today. To request access go to https://www.hashicorp.com/products/terraform/.