Observability, CTS & Nomad Video Highlights from HashiTalks 2022

More than 7,500 people watched our fourth annual global HashiTalks livestream earlier this month, which included some of the most interesting talks yet. Today we wanted to highlight a few of those talks, centering around observability infrastructure, network policy, Consul-Terraform-Sync use cases, and explorations around HashiCorp Nomad. (Stay tuned for additional blog posts covering other themes important to the community.)

»Bootstrapping a Multi-DC Cloud Native Observability Stack

Perennial HashiTalks speaker Bram Vogelaar shows you how to set up a highly available monitoring platform across multiple datacenters, collecting the three major data sources for observability: metrics, logs, and traces. The monitoring platform is a combination of the open source tools Prometheus, Loki, Tempo, Alertmanager, Grafana, and HashiCorp Consul.

»Inspecting Nomad Events Using Grafana Loki

Karan Sharma showcases how his Nomad Events Sink project can process Nomad cluster data to help debug the cluster state and alert operators about new deployments, failing allocations, node updates, and more. You’ll also learn how to use Grafana Loki and set alerts with PromQL in some real-world scenarios where alerts are triggered when a deployment fails and a node is unhealthy — all using Nomad events.

»Policy as Code for Network as Code

HashiCorp Solutions Engineer Nico Vibert teaches us how to use policy as code via Sentinel to prevent network misconfigurations, which as you may know, have the potential to cause a lot of harm. As more network engineers use HashiCorp Terraform to build and manage networking resources, it's imperative to understand how to control and add policy to network as code. Be sure to check out his companion blog post as well.

»Consul-Terraform-Sync — Awesome Use Cases

Lev Andelman wants you to know that Consul-Terraform-Sync is not just for your on-premises firewalls. Want to configure mutual TLS on an ALB? Update HashiCorp Boundary every time an EKS pod changes IP? Replicate two Consul servers when a specific key changes? Andelman takes us beyond the docs with creative use cases for Consul-Terraform-Sync automation.

»Nomad as a HashiCorp Operating System

As an experiment, HashiCorp Solutions Engineer John Boero tried to make a Linux distribution out of Nomad to see if it was possible to run Nomad as process ID 1. He shares the insightful results of the experiment in this talk and describes how the experiment worked out with cloud options and local network boot options for disposable on-premises, bare-metal Nomad clusters.

»Nomad + Flatcar: A Harmonious Marriage of Lightweights

In this talk, Iago López Galeiras introduces Flatcar Container Linux, a popular distribution in the Kubernetes community, and demonstrates how it works just as well — perhaps better — for Nomad. He’ll also explain his best practices and lessons learned deploying Nomad on Flatcar.

»More Highlights on the Way

In the coming weeks, we plan to spotlight many more of the HashiTalks 2022 sessions, covering such topics as large-scale use cases, Terraform tips and strategies, Terraform CI/CD, image pipelines, Kubernetes integrations and workflows, and helpful HashiCorp Vault and Boundary techniques.