Still drowsy and bloated from holiday feasting, the Arctiq team woke the Tuesday morning after Thanksgiving with one mission: board an early-morning flight to San Francisco and join 1500 other attendees and our HashiCorp partners at their largest event of the year, HashiConf (October 10-12).
Arctiq has been a long-time champion of HashiCorp products, and our sponsorship of the event reflects that. Arctiq champions the idea that computers should do what they do best so humans can do what they do best, and our delivery team relies heavily on HashiCorp products - like Terraform - to deliver large-scale change for our clients quickly and repeatedly. As Olena Shtepa, Arctiq’s HashiCorp partner leader put it, “Our partnership with HashiCorp has allowed us to take advantage of the successes of the entire HashiCorp partner ecosystem. We’re able to learn from the successes that other partners have been able to deliver for their clients and build on the relationships that they’ve created across the industry when implementing HashiCorp’s suite of tools, and we’re very pleased to be able to contribute back to the ecosystem ourselves. Especially in today’s world where customer environments span across multiple clouds and many tools, understanding all of those points of integration is a win for everyone, especially our customers.”
It wouldn’t be possible here to do justice to the full range of three jam-packed days of sessions and everyone we talked to during our time at HashiConf, but there is one thing that we’re exceptionally proud of this year - an Arctiq success story on the HashiConf stage.
Arctiq’s Phil Clowater joined Nicole Landry and Tarun Khandelwal from EQ Bank’s Identity and Access Management team to talk about the work Arctiq has done to transform how EQ Bank thinks about security and privileged access management. Security in a hybrid work environment is a challenge for any customer, but in the heavily regulated financial industry it’s an acute concern. Utilizing HashiCorp Vault and Boundary, Arctiq was able to help EQ Bank implement a zero-trust security solution for remote infrastructure access and administration. (If you’re interested in more Boundary, why not check out Arctiq’s upcoming Boundary event here in Toronto on November 28, 2023?).
Videos of the sessions will be available on HashiCorp’s youtube channel shortly (https://www.youtube.com/@HashiCorp/videos) but a few members of the Arctiq team wanted to share what particularly interested them this year:
Adi Sharma, one of Arctiq’s DevOps team leads, was particularly intrigued by updates to HashiCorp Terraform. “Terraform is a platform Arctiq uses extensively, so we’re excited any time there’s an update,” he says. “Testing frameworks and the use of generative AI to create terraform tests was interesting and will definitely make life easier, but what really set the town abuzz was Stacks. This is potentially a huge upgrade to the underlying Terraform platform that will make managing large, complex infrastructure configurations less painful. I’m excited to get hands on with it!”
Matt Thornback, one of Arctiq’s DevSecOps consultants, had his eye on the service mesh space as well. “Consul is a powerful tool for allowing clients to span multiple environments and manage traffic flows across them. But what we’re seeing is clients not just spanning environments using Consul as taking advantage of Consul’s powerful routing features to collapse isolated development environments into a single environment that handles creating testing paths via dynamic routing, instead. It wouldn’t surprise me if in the future, clients end up collapsing even development and production environments into a single set of infrastructure, and simply use Consul routing to handle test-versus-production distinctions.”
Announced updates to Vault were also received favorably by the Arctiq team: “Adding Secrets Sync and Radar to Vault look like powerful expansions of the platform. Many of our clients already utilize secrets scanning within portions of the pipeline, but once you’ve found that secret, you still have to loop back around to Vault to manage the solution. Radar looks like it might be able to ease that path forward in the future. Secrets Sync is a similar part of the same story. It’s not always possible to reach out directly to Vault, so you’d have to maintain secrets in more than one place. With Secrets Sync, Vault can become that source of truth across more of the estate - giving you better visibility and control, and ultimately, security.”
At the end of the day, though, we could have watched the sessions from home. Any conference is about more than what’s on the stage - it’s about what happens in the hallways and around the buffet table. As Findlay Hilchie, a client advocate with Arctiq’s Toronto based sales team summed it up, the interest level from those we met and who stopped by our booth was exceptional. “Often at conferences you have folks with a general interest in technology and a curiosity to know more,” he said. “At HashiConf, it was impressive how many people we spoke to knew exactly what technologies they wanted to leverage and where they needed assistance from a Hashi partner, and we’re thrilled to have discussions with anyone who’s looking for support - whether they’re just getting started with their transformation journey or whether they’re laser-focused on a tricky, specific use case like EQ Bank was.”
If you’re interested in learning more about how Arctiq can help you with your Boundary, Vault, or Terraform work - or your DevOps practice in general - feel free to reach out to us for a quick chat. If you’re looking for something more informal, Arctiq is hosting two events in the coming weeks:
- The Toronto Chapter of HashiCorp User Group for a HashiConf recap on November 14, 2023;
An event specifically targeted at those interested in Zero Trust and Privileged Access Management- Boundary Uncovered: A Happy Hour with Arctiq and HashiCorp - on November 28, 2023.
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