HashiCorp and Microsoft team up on Terraform infrastructure provisioning

HashiCorp and Microsoft announced today that the two organizations will be working together on integrating the popular Terraform infrastructure management software with the Azure cloud platform.

It’s a move by Microsoft that could help with adoption of its cloud platform, especially by enterprises that are the bread and butter of the tech giant’s customer base. Terraform allows developers to provision compute infrastructure using code across both on-premises and cloud environments. This system can help businesses simplify what can be a convoluted task.

“What we’re embarking on here is really a multi-year commitment to building out full resource coverage for Azure so our joint customers can confidently use Terraform to interface with Azure in the way that they do with, perhaps, their on premise infrastructure today,” HashiCorp CEO Dave McJannet said in an interview.

The partnership could also be good news for HashiCorp, which is building a business on providing enterprises with cloud management tools that often are based on open source projects. Working with Microsoft could help that company acquire more business.

Terraform already supports Azure, but the partnership announced today is supposed to help implement new Azure features into the system more rapidly than in the past. In addition, it should help give enterprise customers confidence that Terraform and Azure will continue working together in the years to come.

One of the other benefits to customers of using Terraform is that the system is compatible with multiple cloud platforms, so the same technology they use for provisioning Azure infrastructure will also work with Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, DigitalOcean, and a suite of other providers.

This is the third anniversary of Terraform, which launched in July 2014. Since its inception, the project has seen more than 20,000 code commits from over 1,100 contributors, according to its GitHub page.