HashiDays 2024 Munich recap

Yesterday, I've attended my second in-person HashiDays event. As last year, I chose to attend HashiDays in Munich again. This time, it was a different venue, and I liked it a lot more than last year's venue.

The event was opened by Armon Dagar with a presentation that outlined all the changes across the whole Hashicorp product suite. Also, I earned some "Hashicorp OG" bonus points for being an early Vagrant user, still wondering if I will ever get a badge for it.

Kerim Satirli held the first session about Unlocking the infrastructure lifecycle with the HashiCorp Cloud Platform. Kerim demonstrated the whole infrastructure life cycle, from building Docker containers via Packer to deploying them via Terraform and making all the Infrastructure-as-Code (IaC) artifacts available to developers via the reworked HCP Waypoint product.

Next, Van Phan took over the stage to talk about two of my favorite Hashicorp tools besides Nomad: Vault and Boundary. Van showed how Boundary, in conjunction with Vault, can make dealing with secrets for logging into servers or databases easy. At bitExpert, we are currently investigating and testing Boundary. It was good to see how far we can go with our Boundary setup in the future.

After lunch, it was time to listen to two customer stories about Terraform adoption and how to automate and secure deployments with Terraform. Lufthansa Systems and Helvetia Insurances provided an interesting overview of their processes and adoptions of several Hashicorp tools.

The highlight of the day for me was Rosemary Wang's talk about "Secure Day 2 operations with Boundary and Vault". The talk was a good addition to Van's introduction to the topic and included a bunch of (live) demos. Very well done!

Sadly, I had to leave after Rosemary's talk to catch my train to Berlin. As last year, the event's organization was superb. Not having three parallel events on the same day made sense to me, and I hope the Hashicorp folks will keep it that way next year.