HashiStack

The commonly referenced HashiStack includes Terraform for infrastructure as code, Vault for secrets management, Consul for service discovery and service mesh, Nomad for workload scheduling, and Vagrant and Packer for development environment and image building. These tools are designed to work together but can each be used independently.

In 2023, HashiCorp moved Terraform, Vault, Consul, Nomad, and Packer from the Mozilla Public License to the Business Source License, which restricts competitive use of the software. However, all of these products eventually became available under the MPL 2.0 license again after HashiCorp was acquired by IBM in 2024.

Terraform is primarily an infrastructure provisioning tool that manages cloud resources like VMs, networks, and storage through declarative configuration files. Ansible, by Red Hat, is a configuration management tool that handles software installation and configuration on already-provisioned servers, so they are often used together rather than as direct substitutes.

Consul provides service discovery, health checking, and a distributed key-value store within the HashiStack ecosystem. It allows services to register themselves and discover other services by name, and it can also function as a service mesh through its Connect feature, enabling secure service-to-service communication with mutual TLS.