consul-template VS hcl

The Hashicorp corporation has made a huge impact in providing valuable tools and platforms in the cloud ecosystem. The advantage of using the tools they provide, such as Terraform, Vault, and Packer, is that they all have the same language, Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL). This means you can easily pick up any of these tools by learning HCL, which is similar to JSON. This approach can be useful when choosing tools to learn or use for a project.

Terraform is an open-source infrastructure as a code tool. It is designed by HashiCorp and written in Go Programming Language. Terraform is used to automate the creation of DevOps infrastructure and tasks. Terraform provisions and configures your DevOps infrastructure. It spins up new servers, creates load balancers, and node groups, and performs network configurations. Terraform is mostly applied to provision resources on cloud providers like AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. It can automate and provision infrastructure on any cloud platform. We will use Terraform to set up an Azure Kubernetes Service Cluster that has all the necessary cloud resources.

It can be time-consuming to create and manage the infrastructure that drives your software applications as they grow and become larger. Also, what about ongoing updates and releases of new features? Luckily, there is a solution to this problem in the form of a tool designed by Hashicorp called Terraform. This allows us to define our infrastructure in a central configuration file without having to create it on every provider platform we use.

HashiCorp Sentinel: Sentinel is a PAC tool developed by HashiCorp that can be used in tools such as Terraform, Vault, and Nomad. Sentinel supports writing rules in programming languages such as HCL to automate the enforcement of security and compliance policies.

Terraform is an infrastructure as code tool (IAC) created by HashiCorp that lets you automate cloud and on-prem resources. It uses configuration files written in HashiCorp Configuration Language (HCL) to declare resources (infrastructure objects) and define dependencies between them. To put it simply, this tool allows you to write a few configuration files and build a whole system’s architecture on the cloud by running a couple of commands. I found this to be a more efficient alternative to clicking through a console to create resources manually.

It was clear back in 2021 that Lob needed to consolidate how we run code and none of our current tools were up to the task; it wasn’t a matter of if Lob would upgrade to something new, but when. The Platform team kicked off a research project to find Lob’s next service platform. Forever ago (back in 2019) we investigated migrating to Kubernetes, a popular but notoriously difficult-to-manage tool for this sort of thing, but that project fizzled out for many reasons, forcing us to consider something else. We chose Nomad which offers a comparable feature set to Kubernetes in a much more streamlined package. Nomad is developed by HashiCorp, a leader in the DevOps space, and is used by companies like Pandora, Cloudflare, Internet Archive, and Roblox.

If however, you have an application service that needs support for 2+ ports, because you know, Kubernetes supports this, I would recommend avoiding Consul Connect, as it is not functional to meet minimum requirements for a service mesh. Perhaps someday, when Hashicorp prioritizes basic functionality and usability in future version, this product can be considered.

Looks a lot like Hashicorp (a technology company), maybe too similar, and not particularly evocative IMO.

AWS VPC is a simple example. This feature really shines when building reusable infrastructure-as-code for Network Firewall or even Network ACLs. Anything that simplifies something and reduces or eliminates any hacks required to reach a logical outcome is super valuable. Great work finally driving this one home HashiCorp.

Terraform HCL (HashiCorp Configuration Language) is an essential language for cloud engineers in 2024, particularly for those involved in infrastructure as code (IaC) practices. HCL is the configuration language used by Terraform, a widely adopted tool that enables engineers to define, provision, and manage cloud infrastructure using a declarative configuration approach. Learning Terraform HCL allows cloud engineers to automate the deployment and lifecycle management of cloud resources across various service providers, ensuring consistency, repeatability, and scalability of cloud environments.

Reminds me of [HCL](https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl), but without all the providers to deploy the config?

HCL: A Go implementation structured configuration language. The native syntax of HCL is inspired by libucl and nginx configurations. It is used to create a structured configuration language that is friendly to humans and machines, mainly for DevOps tools, server configurations, and resource configurations as a Terraform language.

HCL has a JSON representation [1], internally, objects behave that way. so it should be possible to write a Jsonnet wrapper around it. Terraform can currently parse json pipelines too.

[1]: https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl/blob/main/json/spec.md

>https://noyaml.com/

I'm not sure this is the criticism you think it is. Wow, so you basically have to add quotes to get strings in some ambiguous situations?

Yeah sure you could probably improve YAML by getting rid of these weird pitfalls, but that is a minor improvement. The alternative isn't something like TOML, because YAML is optimized for hierarchical configuration. It's every vendor implementing a different syntax such as Hashicorp with their HCL [0].

[0] https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl

The Hashicorp corporation has made a huge impact in providing valuable tools and platforms in the cloud ecosystem. The advantage of using the tools they provide, such as Terraform, Vault, and Packer, is that they all have the same language, Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL). This means you can easily pick up any of these tools by learning HCL, which is similar to JSON. This approach can be useful when choosing tools to learn or use for a project.

Format is HCL language feature: https://github.com/hashicorp/hcl/blob/main/hclwrite/public.go

Hi, from what I read from HCL Github "HCL is a syntax and API specifically designed for building structured configuration formats.".

When the desired state is relatively simple to define and the mechanism to reach that state is not that important, writing up a declaration of what is needed and letting something/someone else deal with it is the most logical abstraction. This would be like drafting up the architectural draft for your new restaurant and paying a contracting company to actually build it, or writing HTML and letting a web browser render it, or writing a Terraform HCL file and letting the Terraform CLI tool apply it. This is called declarative programming in the software world, and has many advantages (and a few disadvantages!) for cloud infrastructure management.