HashiCorp’s Terraform needs no introduction. It is all but the de facto vehicle for delivering cloud infrastructure, and for a good reason. What Terraform did for Multi-Cloud Infrastructure as Code, is precisely what Alkira does for the network. What happens when you use these two platforms together to deliver networking in and across clouds? If providing network services in code faster than ever before sounds interesting, this multi-part series is for you.

Effectively automating infrastructure is no longer a luxury but a staple in the enterprise move through future transformation. I wrote a blog recently about using Terraform with Packer together, and wanted to take this thought further with breaking down Terraform Modules and getting well connected with Terraform Cloud. I recently put together a simple module for building base infrastructure in AWS for the purpose of testing Alkira Network Cloud. Let’s dive in!

This is going to be a gigantic pivot from my usual topics of writing. If you are interested in learning something about cryptocurrency, stay put. The goal is to make this unbiased and thought-provoking while shedding light on what seems like a world of confusion and misinformation. In the past month, I have heard various first-hand opinions about Bitcoin like, it is a pyramid scheme, basically gambling, will supersede the U.

In Part 1, we went over some fundamentals. For Part 2, we will examine Azure network design patterns based on cloud maturity and organization size. The concept of design patterns was first introduced by Christopher Alexander and has profoundly influenced many technical disciplines. To keep things simple, let’s define a design pattern as a reusable solution to a commonly occurring problem. Of course, you are not the first practitioner out there transitioning to cloud or growing to a new maturity model.

Is cloud networking complicated, or is it just different? In building your infrastructure in the cloud, end-to-end system complexity increases exponentially. As enterprise applications mature, the foundational infrastructure and networking used to host and transport them must evolve. One obvious crux of networking is blast radius - you cannot easily modify it without down-time. This is Part 1 of a multi-part series that will explore Azure networking. To the best of my ability, this series will be written to articulate real-world scenarios and bring attention to specifics that are critical to an understanding before diving into cloud networking architecture.

Manually provisioning infrastructure slows down application delivery, isolates knowledge, can hamper operations teams, and doesn’t scale. Automating infrastructure provisioning can address these challenges by shifting manual process into code. Hashicorp has products spanning the infrastructure, security, and application stack that can unlock that cloud operating model and deliver applications faster. Let’s examine image lifecycle management and IaaS deployment. Both of these tasks are common challenges faced by the enterprise when moving to the cloud.