Cisco struck a multi-year deal to sell HashiCorp’s Terraform Cloud Business infrastructure-as-code (IaC) software product as a hosted platform alongside its own Intersight cloud-based infrastructure management tool. The platform adds another layer of management for enterprises needing to oversee their hybrid cloud deployments.

The combination provides users a single sign-on and management platform for applying IaC to their private and hybrid cloud environments. It’s delivered through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) experience to ease deployment and management and will be mostly managed through Cisco.

Vijay Venugopal, head of product management for Cisco Cloud and Compute Software, explained that the service integrates the Terraform SaaS agents into the Intersight secured framework for data center management. He noted that this makes it easier for those Terraform agents to access those data center assets that are typically behind a firewall environment. This means the combined effort acts as a bridge for integrating on-premises environments with Terraform Cloud Business and allows a DevOps team to automate infrastructure provisioning using IaaC across a hybrid cloud deployment.

“We are seeing that as customers are using infrastructure as code for public cloud functions, we’re increasingly seeing the need for customers to apply IaC to private clouds as well,” Venugopal said in an interview. “And that's what this partnership is in applying IaC to the private cloud as well.”

Within the broader Cisco Intersight topology, the HashiCorp offer will sit alongside the Intersight Workload Optimizer and Cloud Orchestrator as the top-level abstraction layer below a customer’s actual private or public cloud deployment. Below that abstraction layer sits Cisco’s Intersight Virtualization Service and Kubernetes Service, which both sit on top of Intersight Infrastructure Service.

Enterprises can access the combined offering through Cisco’s DevNet SolutionsPlus program beginning in April. Venugopal added that the vendor will offer centralized support for the service, though any “level three” support escalation will be handled by HashiCorp.

Bob Laliberte, senior analyst at ESG, said the move is a “natural evolution” for Cisco’s Intersight program and “will be well received by Cisco customers.” He cited recent ESG surveys that have highlighted the growing complexity IT teams have been dealing with in terms of managing their diverse cloud deployments.

“Application teams and developers have raced ahead with open source tools and cloud-native approaches to modern application design and deployment with tremendous success,” Laliberte noted in an email to questions. “However, businesses are now recognizing that legacy IT is an incredibly important piece of an application modernization strategy. HashiCorp helps IT operations, developers, and engineers glue together the modern application lifecycle with the support and trusted data center brand of Cisco.”

HashiCorp initially announced the Terraform Cloud product in 2019, angling it as the as-a-service option for its long-running Terraform IaaC software product. The cloud-iteration was designed to act 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 last year updated that platform with a new “Business” tier that sat on top of the initial “Free” and “Team and Governance” options. That new tier, which is the one Cisco is offering, includes more advanced security, compliance, and governance options, it can execute multiple requests concurrently, and it has different support models.

At the time of the update, HashiCorp said it had added more than 5,000 new Terraform Cloud users per month since the initial launch and that it was supporting 500,000 infrastructure provisioning requests each month.

Cisco initially launched Intersight in 2017, having spun out of the vendor’s Project Starship efforts.

The vendor last year added a Kubernetes Service option to the platform designed to simplify multi-cloud and on-premises application management. It acts to automate the lifecycle management of Kubernetes and containerized applications running across any infrastructure environment.

Laliberte added that the HashiCorp integration will further Cisco’s ability to “engage with its customers that have been using open source tooling or have attempted to build their own DevOps tools.”