Get-vm.com Website Review

Recently, I have put a lot of time into HashiCorp’s Terraform product. It interests me because of its capability to on-premises infrastructure to public cloud infrastructure, I need a tool to automate new deployments. Terraform checks the boxes to help me achieve these goals. As I dove de*per into Terraform and its enterprise variant, I discovered Sentinel which is a policy framework that HashiCorp built to provide governance across their enterprise products. Many of us in IT enjoy our full admin access in our environments. However, when we provide a self-service method to our users to begin deploying their own resources, we need policies to keep our users in check. This is especially true when we grant our users access to the public cloud where resources incur hourly or monthly charges. As a result, provisioning resources in the public cloud without guardrails will quickly get out of hand and can rack up a hefty bill. Therefore, it requires some level of governance to exist.  Sentinel is embedded in many of HashiCorp’s enterprise products. This article will focus on the Terraform Enterprise product. Sentinel is included in the Premium tier of Terraform Enterprise. When Sentinel is used within Terraform Enterprise, it grants a way to limit resource deployment from our Terraform code. Every company has policies in place to ensure standard practices and enforcing limitations on its users, developers, and even the infrastructure team itself. A few examples of the most common governance put into place are: Terraform Enterprise can deploy many types of resources across numerous infrastructure providers. In the wrong hands, these deployments can present many problems beyond just a large bill at the end of the month. When Sentinel policies are enforced within Terraform Enterprise, the IT staff can ensure infrastructure provisioning can be tightly controlled. Sentinel policies are small pieces of code written in Hashicorp’s Sentinel policy language. Let’s take a look at how a Sentinel policy is built.