HashiCorp Introduces Its First Managed Cloud Service

HashiCorp Cloud Platform breaks ground for the DevOps standout, delivering a “pushbutton” service that will eventually offer its widely adopted tools across the three largest public clouds.

HashiCorp, a standout DevOps technology provider, on Monday introduced its first managed service, complete with a roadmap for delivering one of the industry’s most-popular portfolios of open source automation tools on the leading public clouds.

HashiCorp Cloud Platform for the first time will make HashiCorp’s solutions for provisioning, securing, connecting and running infrastructure available to large customers as a vendor-managed, turnkey service, HashiCorp founder and CTO Mitchell Hashimoto told the company’s ecosystem in a HashiConf keynote.

“Our vision for HCP is really the vision for the company, which is to bridge multi-cloud infrastructure and make it all work seamlessly together,” Hashimoto said during the online event.

[Related: HashiCorp Valuation Surges Above $5 Billion With Latest Funding Round]

The groundbreaking platform was motivated by customers requesting HashiCorp make a greater investment in cloud services that deliver a “pushbutton experience”—essentially delivering HashiCorp’s products through a Software-as-a-Service model, Hashimoto said.

The company worked on that project for a couple years, he said, leading up to the planned rollout of the managed service that will allow users to focus more on building applications, rather than running HashiCorp software to automate their infrastructure, he said.

“We want to provide one multi-cloud workflow,” Hashimoto said. To that end, the cloud platform will eventually offer networking capabilities that seamlessly bridge multiple cloud providers.

HashiCorp, founded in 2012 and now funded to the tune of $349 million, has an enviable customer roster, including seven of the Fortune 10, and eight of the world’s 10 largest financial services providers.

“It’s really mission-critical stuff,” James Bayer, HashiCorp vice president of product management, told CRN after Hashimoto’s keynote.

Large customers have built dedicated cloud teams to orchestrate the technology, such as Adobe Systems, which conducts on the order of 100 trillion transactions a year using Vault, the HashiCorp secret storage solution.

“What if you didn’t have to put a whole bunch of people to your teams to operating our products and get best-in-class security and operations?” Bayer asked. “What we’re announcing is going to be an increasingly popular method for customers to consume HashiCorp in cloud.”

HashiCorp has been working up to that goal, Bayer said.

The San Francisco-based company dipped its toes in the water with previous offerings like Terraform Cloud, a managed version of its configuration management product that’s seen rapid adoption—on the order of five thousand signups a month—since released last September.

Then came HashiCorp Consul Service on Azure, delivering the service networking platform deeply integrated with Microsoft’s cloud, which is currently in public beta and should be generally released next month.

Those “steps forward in our cloud journey,” he said, “paved the way for us to launch our full cloud vision.”

HashiCorp Cloud Platform will be rolled out in stages.

The first product, HCP Consul on AWS, released Monday in private beta, is a “down payment,” Bayer said. Next will come a fully managed Vault offering on AWS, followed by Terraform and Nomad services, as well as Google Cloud Platform support.

“We’ll just keep going till we get all of the board covered,” Bayer said.

The platform will facilitate centralized policies that apply to whichever cloud the customer prefers, as well as the HashiCorp Virtual Network that abstracts network connections across those providers.

While HashiCorp partners often offer their own managed services, the company's growing channel will play an important role in the new cloud platform—especially those less interested in handling some of the “mundane work” of implementations, he said.

“This is going to help them focus more on using and scaling usage of our products, verses installing and configuring,” Bayer said.

World Wide Technology, one of the industry’s largest services providers, has already seen strong demand for Terraform Cloud and HCS on Azure, HashiCorp’s initial forays into managed cloud offerings.

“From WWT’s perspective, HashiCorp has already established significant market relevance with their cloud automation and security portfolio,” said Jim Melton, WWT Practice Manager for multicloud enablement and integration.

The new cloud platform, first offering Consul and Vault as managed services, will likely ramp adoption rates, and encourage clients to consider expanding into the broader HashiCorp portfolio, he said.

“We see this as a great way for WWT to provide value to our customers by working with the operations side of their automation efforts as they accelerate a ‘Cloud Smart’ strategy and multi-cloud architecture,” Melton told CRN.

HashiCorp Cloud Platform will just add another option for partners, especially those solely focused on services, as to how to enable customers to consume HashiCorp tools, said Chris Ciborowski, CEO of Nebulaworks, a HashiCorp integrator based in Irvine, Calif. that’s exclusively focused on cloud-native engagements.

“It does create many other questions about the impact to users on the ability to integrate the toolset to maximize their benefit while providing flexibility and agility during the adoption curve,” Ciborowski said.

Those questions will be answered as the platform is released in phases, and constraints are identified, he said.

While there’s always the potential of channel conflict for resellers with a new SaaS pay-as-you-go offering, that model will likely only be a good fit for some enterprises, Ciborowski said.

HashiCorp’s Bayer told CRN the timeline for the platform’s release was affected by the coronavirus crisis, as HashiCorp has seen significant acceleration in its customers’ public cloud adoption plans.

“The trend is [the pandemic] brought forward these cloud motions that customers have had,” Bayer said. As such, “we have increased our investments and timeframes for cloud to bring them faster. The roadmap for showing our path forward, we’ve accelerated that as a response to Covid.”