Microsoft extended its existing partnership with HashiCorp Monday to deepen links between its Terraform product, which lets software developers use the same tools across multiple clouds or hybrid cloud deployments, and its Azure cloud service.
The companies announced a “multiyear” deal to connect Azure services like Azure Container Instances to Terraform, expanding work that had already been done to connect Terraform and other HashiCorp products to Azure Resource Manager, said Corey Sanders, director of Compute for Azure. “They … have a rich portfolio of products that can help our customers adopt DevOps principles to automate management of their infrastructure on Azure and across multiple environments,” he wrote in a blog post.
Definitions vary, but DevOps is a growing philosophy around software development that asks developers to be more nimble, and Terraform helps by abstracting some of the basic infrastructure work developers need to do to use their existing development tools in more than one place. It’s designed for customers that want to manage a set of applications running across multiple environments, whether that’s public cloud providers like Azure and Amazon Web Services, or in their own data centers, or both.
At least compared to AWS, Microsoft has been a little more public in its encouragement of projects that make it easier to move between clouds or enable hybrid cloud strategies, which makes sense if you’re trying to steal workloads from the market leader.
Unlike the early days of cloud computing, when startups and bigger companies alike were happy to throw everything at their public cloud provider and worry about something else, today’s cloud customers appear to be more interested in picking and choosing their spots when it comes to cloud deployments. Closer ties with Terraform could help Microsoft convince companies that have already decided they want to run their applications across different environments spend a little more time and money on Azure.
HashiCorp was founded by a pair of computer science graduates of the University of Washington, Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar. Hashimoto recently spoke at our GeekWire Cloud Tech Summit on the importance of building security thinking into DevOps culture.
