HashiCorp Inc., the infrastructure automation startup that received a $5.1 billion valuation in March, early today launched a new flagship product designed to make it more practical for enterprises to build multicloud environments.

San Francisco-based HashiCorp provides a set of open-source tools for managing cloud infrastructure. They were downloaded millions of times last year and are used by enterprises to deploy applications, maintain them, handle networking and perform security tasks.

The new HashiCorp Cloud Platform announced today at its HashiCorp. Digital event makes the company’s tools available as managed services so customers can use them more easily. The launch is not entirely unexpected. Armon Dadgar, HashiCorp’s co-founder, hinted in an interview (below) on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE studio last year that the startup was thinking about launching a managed solution. 

“The irony of HashiCorp is we’re a cloud infrastructure company but we sell desktop software,” Dadgar told theCUBE host John Furrier. “There’s an obvious disconnect there. How do we right that and say: People want to consume this stuff as a service, how do we meet them where they are?”

The idea behind HashiCorp Cloud Platform is to create a unified infrastructure automation layer spanning Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Corp.’s Azure and Google Cloud. Customers will have the ability to centrally manage resources across these three clouds using HashiCorp’s tools through a common set of application programming interfaces. There’s also a virtual network that will make it possible to directly connect workloads on different clouds. 

Initially, however, the HashiCorp Cloud Platform includes just a single service that for now only supports AWS: a managed version of Consul. Consul is HashiCorp’s network management tool for configuring and monitoring network connections. Customers can use the managed version, called HCP Consul, to handle connections between their AWS workloads well as between AWS and other clouds or private data centers.

HCP Consul comes pre-packaged, which is also the strategy the startup plans to take with the other tools it will add to the HashiCorp Cloud Platform in the future. HCP Consul comes with default security settings set by the startup’s engineers that ensure features such as encryption are properly set up. After the initial deployment, HashiCorp  also handles key maintenance tasks in the customer’s environment.

“Upgrades, backups, monitoring, and scaling are all handled in the background by the engineering teams that build and maintain the core products,” Mitchell Hashimoto, HashiCorp’s other co-founder, wrote in a blog post today. “Operational issues can be resolved efficiently since logs, telemetry, and debug information are all readily available to HashiCorp operators.”

One of the goals behind the HashiCorp Cloud Platform is to reduce the time it takes the large enterprise customers to get up and running with the startup’s tools. Another is to make these tools more accessible for smaller companies. The product has a pay-as-you-go pricing model that, Hashimoto wrote, aims to reduce upfront costs.

Making its tools more accessible in a managed form could help HashiCorp expand its addressable market and drive more recurring revenue. That, in turn, may put the startup in a better position to capture the growing enterprise spending on automation tools Dadgar noted during his appearance on theCUBE last year.  

“It’s not managing one simple app anymore, there’s a ton of complexity in managing the multicloud, multiplatform nature of it, so I think there’s a lot more investment in management tooling and process to make that sane,” Dadgar said.

HCP Consul is currently in alpha test mode. A managed version of Vault, HashiCorp’s tool for storing cybersecurity-related data as passwords and security certificates, is the next tool that will land in the HashiCorp Cloud Platform. The startup also offers Terraform, for configuring infrastructure, and Nomad, a cluster and application scheduler, both of which will be added to to the platform as well. 

HashiCorp announced the new cloud platform at its virtual HashiCorp Digital event today.

Image: HashiCorp