HashiCorp Inc., the well-funded automation startup, today rolled out a product called Terraform Enterprise into general availability that promises to codify how companies manage their infrastructure.

The launch follows an extensive beta program that saw more than 100 organizations pilot the software.

Based on an open-source tool HashiCorp originally released in 2014, Terraform Enterprise can be used to create a blueprint of a technology environment describing what components it should contain and how they are expected to interact. The software then enables operations personnel to automatically set up the infrastructure in the specified manner without most of the hands-on work the task normally requires.

Terraform Enterprise lends itself particularly well to spinning up cloud deployments. According to HashiCorp, the product allows users to provision infrastructure resources quickly from a platform such as Amazon Web Services and install the necessary software components on top. Administrators can simply tweak the underlying blueprint if they need to make a change to environment.

During the beta program, HashiCorp augmented the core feature set with several additional capabilities. The arguably most significant one is integration with the Sentinel policy enforcement framework that it introduced in September.

The tool can place restrictions on how administrators use Terraform Enterprise and other HashiCorp products. A company, could, for example, allow the creation of a new cloud environment only if its network settings are configured in a secure manner. This helps prevent the kind of costly operational mistakes that make it into the headlines.

In the same spirit of easing policy enforcement, Terraform Enterprise can connect to a company’s identity management system and limit what users may do based on their role. It also has a programming interface for integrating with other automation tools. The latter feature is complemented by support for “service accounts” that are not tied to a specific user, which streamlines the task of hooking up Terraform Enterprise to an external application.   

Image: HashiCorp