CDI Positioned to Deliver Best of Both Worlds Strategy with New Cisco Intersight Service for HashiCorp Terraform
Today, we have arrived at a very convenient and welcome milestone in our hybrid cloud journey.
HashiCorp recently announced it has entered into a multi-year agreement in which Cisco will offer HashiCorp Terraform Cloud Business with the Cisco Intersight platform. For CDI customers, this means you can finally leverage a hybrid cloud operating model using Terraform infrastructure-as-code (IaC) for provisioning and management of private datacenters with Cisco Intersight.
With Cisco Intersight Service for HashiCorp Terraform, CDI can help your DevOps teams extend their automation of public cloud resources to on-premises resources. Through our collective partnership, customers like you—small, mid-size, or the largest enterprise organizations—can engage CDI to put the power of Cisco and HashiCorp Terraform to work for you!
Allow me to break this major announcement down for you in a historical context.
Yesterday: You Were Stuck in a DIY Trap
You already knew the HashiCorp Terraform open-source solution provided ways to manage cloud operations in a single workflow. Many of you were able to utilize Terraform Cloud for its remote operations, governance, and collaborative features. However, your on-prem teams in the data center were challenged, to say the least.
A need for speed in deploying and updating applications drove IaC adoption with your DevOps teams as they worked with their preferred public clouds. But in on-prem environments, there was no capability to deploy applications across your entire hybrid IT landscape without having to add more tools to manage. IT operations teams want to transition from provisioning static on-prem resources to making dynamic infrastructure readily available for integration with their DevOps IaC plans. Unfortunately, the manual integration of your on-prem environment to a cloud-based IaC toolchain typically meant additional tools needed to be managed locally for every datacenter.
As an on-prem network administrator, you could not program your infrastructure resources from SaaS platforms until painful requirements were satisfied:
- All firewall rules had to be precisely defined.
- All agents had to be installed on site with orchestration in place.
- Containers had to be deployed and VMs ready.
…and, of course, guess who had to patch, upgrade, and manage all this? You.
You were essentially stuck in DIY mode, managing communications between the agent and Terraform.
Managing and scaling on-prem datacenter infrastructure from even the most sophisticated, automated cloud operations platform remained a significant roadblock.
Until now.
With the recent announcement, HashiCorp, Cisco, and CDI are now able to integrate the management of your on-prem Terraform agents with the same successful IaC engine that is running your cloud deployments. When you engage CDI to get provisioned on a public cloud such as AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud Platform, and can also enjoy extending the benefits of your integrated cloud ops model to your on-prem infrastructure. That means your data center teams can finally orchestrate almost everything from the cloud whether its Windows, Linux, virtual, physical, networking, storage, apps, OS updates, routers, switches, containerized, public, private, hybrid, SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS.
Today: The Pivotal Role CDI Plays
CDI is a trusted partner for the delivery of the most advanced hybrid cloud projects worldwide, a recognized global leader in robust digital transformation initiatives, and a professional provider of technology solutions including Cisco Intersight Service for HashiCorp Terraform.
CDI has been working with leading customers to integrate their infrastructure and CI/CD pipeline and to implement programmable infrastructure solutions with automation technology and HashiCorp Terraform has emerged as a popular choice. They like its SaaS deployment model, especially convenient for cloud-based deployments; however, our customers with hybrid infrastructure experienced challenges with the management and deployment of on-prem infrastructure with a SaaS based instance of Terraform (agents, VMs, firewall rules, etc.). For this reason, some customers chose to implement on-prem instances of Terraform, or in some cases, fragmented IaC strategies across on-prem and cloud infrastructures.
CDI has also been working with customers to deploy Intersight, a SaaS-based hybrid cloud management platform that has already addressed many of the challenges of secure connectivity between the cloud and ground-based deployments via its Intersight Assist feature. In much the same way that CDI has been bringing vendor technologies together to deliver elegant outcome-driven solutions for our clients, we are seeing the integration happen at the vendor level which is especially great to see. We are excited about the future value offerings from CDI resulting from the Cisco-HashiCorp joint effort.
Tomorrow: The Key Benefits Our Leading Customers Will Enjoy
Here are just a few of the benefits of Cisco Intersight Service for HashiCorp Terraform, the emerging new partnership, and the opportunities it will generate:
- Simple: Less operational complexity and more productivity using IaC to provision and manage your hybrid cloud environment.
- Cost-Effective: Your organization can still use its current physical hardware, but they can also integrate with expanded networks, virtual networks, and software defined networking (SDN) architectures.
- Scalable: Manages the end-to-end deployment, scaling, upgrade, and networking lifecycles of Terraform agents for you so you can scale with more agents, virtual infrastructure, and automation that will, in turn, provide you with greater freedom from DIY pitfalls.
- Automated: No more containerized deployments, firewall rules, patches, upgrades, or other DIY tasks—Intersight will do the seamless secure scaling up and out for you!
- Convenient: A seamless experience for applying IaC to private and hybrid cloud—DevOps teams get the agility they need with ready-to-consume on-prem infrastructure, securely integrated with their IaC tools, plus reduced operational overhead of connecting IaC pipelines with infrastructure domain management.
- Secure: Secure SaaS delivery of integrated Cisco Intersight and HashiCorp Terraform solutions simplifies your management footprint for hybrid cloud while reducing risk and without compromising security.
- Reliable: Cisco centralized support offering spans your Intersight and HashiCorp Terraform Cloud Business environments under one umbrella Cisco Solution Support program.
- Extensible: Hybrid cloud partnership between industry leaders with a rich catalog of Terraform providers and a single point of contact for support and enablement.
Are You Ready to Bridge the Gap?
When you are ready to bridge the gap between a cloud-first IaC strategy and on-prem infrastructure, CDI can help you scale your current Terraform deployments, integrate new solutions in your CI/CD pipeline, and develop a methodology for running these projects. Whether you need advanced Terraform developers, custom Ansible modules, ServiceNow workflow automation, CI/CD pipeline tools, architecture improvements, or infrastructure updates, CDI has the experience, network of resources, and skills to bring value quickly to your IaC projects.
Imagine the possibilities—and savor the results. After your next engagement with CDI, you will come away with a new solution and tools that simplify, automate, optimize, enable, accelerate, and join IT Ops with DevOps and bridge gaps between on-prem and cloud all under the same automation methods and a common cloud operating model.
To learn more, see Cisco and HashiCorp Join Forces to Deliver Infrastructure as Code Automation Across Hybrid Cloud available on Cisco Blogs at: https://blogs.cisco.com/cloud/cisco-and-hashicorp-join-forces-to-deliver-infrastructure-as-code-automation-across-hybrid-cloud
Need a demo? Want a professional consultation to learn more? Contact CDI.