HashiCorp Inc. announced multiple updates on the product front at its HashiConf 2022 event in Amsterdam today, including a new feature that aims to prevent “infrastructure drift.”

HashiCorp is in the business of information technology infrastructure automation. Its flagship platform Terraform enables system administrators to write scripts that define how their cloud and on-premises IT infrastructure is configured.

It’s much faster than the old way of doing things, which involves navigating through various infrastructure management consoles. With Terraform, admins can automate the configuration of hundreds of settings that would otherwise have to be done manually.

The new Drift Detection for Terraform Cloud feature, now in public beta, is supposed to keep an eye on the state of a company’s infrastructure and notify admins if any changes occur.

Customers could be forgiven for thinking that HashiCorp’s infrastructure-as-code offering would ensure everything remains in the same state as it was originally defined. However, the reality is different because engineers have a tendency to tweak settings from time to time. If that happens too often, though, the infrastructure may end up not working as it should.

HashiCorp explained that losing control of infrastructure configuration leads to all kinds of problems, with development, testing and production environments no longer in sync. So if an admin makes a temporary change in testing and forgets about it, the code that worked in that environment might fail when it’s moved to production.

Drift Detection is meant to solve these problems. It works by checking to see if a resource differs from the state file. If it finds something, it will notify admins within the workspace and also through email or Slack so they can set about fixing it.

In another update, HashiCorp said it has launched Waypoint in private beta on the HashiCorp Cloud Platform. Waypoint is an open source tool that provides a consistent way for developers to build, deploy and release applications across a variety of platforms using a single file and single command.

Waypoint was already available as a self-hosted platform, but getting it up and running requires a lot of manual effort. Not everyone wants to do that, of course, so HashiCorp is now making it available as a managed service.

Finally, HashiCorp said, it has made a new developer site available in public beta. The HashiCorp Developer site is a place for developers to learn all about the company’s offerings in various interactive test lab environments, and is home to hundreds of tutorials and thousands of reference documents, the company said.

Image: HashiCorp