The world of microservices, containers and everything cloud has sparked both innovation and confusion since gaining popularity in mainstream enterprise. With the rapid explosion of this technology leaving many companies scrambling to construct processes and infrastructure, integration platforms are rising to meet the challenge of organizing procedures and enabling streamlined function.

“One of the challenges we’re facing as an industry is … customers … don’t even know where to begin. …We have a bit of an issue around the sheer amount of innovation. How do we curate that and make it more accessible?” asked Armon Dadgar (pictured), co-founder and chief technology officer of HashiCorp Inc. At HashiCorp, Dadgar is working to distill the daunting cloud ecosystem to give customers a roadmap for using and integrating the tools necessary to innovation.

Dadgar spoke with John Furrier (@furrier) and Stu Miniman (@stu), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event in Austin, Texas. They discussed how HashiCorp is helping customers develop integrations in a constantly evolving market. (* Disclosure below.)

Bridging the cloud gaps for enterprise innovation

For HashiCorp’s customers, the greatest challenge is a lack of insight into the future landscape of the market. HashiCorp works to help them navigate it by providing tools customized for every major level of tech operation.

“We help operators get a handle around the provisioning side with things like Terraform. … We help the security folks with tools like Volt,” Dadgar said. Terraform is an open-source tool that codifies application program interfaces into declarative configuration files.

Knowing most customers are using a combination of tools outside their company as a part of their overall strategy, HashiCorp makes it its mission to provide the best possible integration experience. “A lot of our customers are Kubernetes [container orchestration management system] users. So for us the mission is … [to] make sure Terraform [and Vault] play nice with Kubernetes. … For us it’s … how do we make all of this work together,” he said.

Dadgar’s greatest concern is empowering customers with the ability to use all available tools to their full potential and keep those integrations working seamlessly as the technology moves forward at a rapid pace. “With … Terraform, we’ve been partnering with all the various cloud providers. How do we have first-class support for Azure, and Google Cloud, and Amazon and make sure that as you’re adopting these clouds, Terraform meets you there?” Dadgar asked.

Giving enterprises the tools to enable these integrations is democratizing the advantages long held by the top tech players. “These big tech companies have shown if you’re able to move up the abstraction and provide this higher-level utility to developers, you can … innovate much more quickly. … What Kubernetes is really doing is bringing that to everybody else,” Dadgar said.

Giving customers the opportunity to get up to speed in the cloud and innovate at pace with tech heavyweights is mission-critical for Dadgar. “The better we can be at being plumbing, the better the application developers can be at delivering innovation there. … That was partly one of the reasons we started HashiCorp,” he concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the KubeCon + CloudNativeCon event. (* Disclosure: Red Hat Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Red Hat nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE