HashiCorp dressed up its Terraform Cloud product with a new “Business” tier that adds more features and customization options for organizations wanting more cost control.

The Business tier builds on top of the Terraform "Free" and "Team and Governance" options that remain available. The new tier includes more advanced security, compliance, and governance options, it can execute multiple requests concurrently, and it has different support models.

Meghan Liese, director of product marketing for HashiCorp, explained that the security updates includes single sign-on (SSO) integration initially with Okta. Liese said that HashiCorp would be adding SSO integration with SAML and Microsoft’s ADFS.

There are also fixed IP addresses that make it easier to authorize connection tools through a corporate firewall and self-hosting agents that can be housed within a private network or on-premises environment for an added layer of security.

Liese explained that the self-hosting agents “can be used now to go and provision and manage securely into environments that might be private.” She noted this would help organizations to maintain security for infrastructure in different environments.

“A lot of the infrastructure that we see is like VMware that sits in their private data center, or they have Cisco ACI Anywhere that's creating that private part of their private network and their private data center. So these are a lot of the vendors that we see,” Liese said. “So the providers exist, but they would still have to self-host Terraform inside their private network so that it could access those resources. But now with the use of self-hosted agents, they'll be able to do those all on their own.”

The Business tier also integrates Splunk audit logging for data tracking, visibility, and compliance, and the concurrency update reduces queue times for runs through the system.

Liese said the new pricing tier also pivots Terraform Cloud more toward a consumption model, though for now it continues to have an annual contract tied to the overall offering.

“However, it is set up to probably eventually be a consumption-based model if we just directionally look to where everyone is going,” Liese explained. "You could see where you at some point you would not have to commit annually and just do a consumption-based once the time is right for us.”

The Terraform Cloud platform is the as-a-service option for HashiCorp’s long-running Terraform infrastructure-as-a-code software product. HashiCorp’s other automation tools include its Consul service mesh platform, the Vault centralized security management platform, and the Nomad cluster scheduler.

HashiCorp initially announced the Terraform Cloud product last year. It acts as a hosted platform that sits between a cloud or platform provider and the enterprise. Users direct their code into Terraform Cloud where it then acts to direct that code into the right cloud or Kubernetes environment.

The vendor said it has added more than 5,000 new Terraform Cloud users per month since the platform launched last year. It’s now supporting 500,000 infrastructure provisioning requests each month.

Liese said that HashiCorp had planned to release the latest update later in the year, but that the COVID-19 pandemic quickly changed customer needs.

“Things were going relatively well and then we just saw a massive shift in interest,” Liese said. “People were telling us that they were going to need to cut back, that they would need to consume things more easily, and that they would need more flexible pricing models. All of those were a contributing factor in us accelerating to offer this now rather than later in the year.”

The vendor did manage to secure a $175 million Series E funding round right around the time that the pandemic began forcing those organizational decisions. That round pushed HashiCorp's valuation past $5 billion.