Streamlining HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) Deployments With Terraform

It’s no longer a buzzword, Infrastructure as Code (IaC) is becoming crucial to building scalable, secure, and reliable operations for any organization leveraging the cloud. After many years of tools such as Terraform allowing you to manage your own virtual machines, networking, and container services, HashiCorp has put its own spin on the idea with the HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP).

HashiCorp provides managed offerings for their ecosystem Consul and Vault, so you don’t have to install and configure them from scratch. When combined with Terraform, HCP essentially becomes an effortless method of using the cloud to adopt and administer crucial infrastructure components. In this article, we will see how HCP works, what you could use for, and how to automate your deployment with Terraform.

Now that we understand how to use virtual machines and containers in general, let’s answer the question: 

Why use the HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP)?

• Reduced operational overhead: The setup of Vault or Consul for production usually requires advanced knowledge of clustering, networking, monitoring, and patching. When we run these critical services in a managed environment with HCP, you get high availability and automatic upgrades.
• Scalability and reliability: The HCP underlying architecture means you are able to scale your environment as your demands grow. HashiCorp handles regional redundancy; you don’t have to roll your own multi-region replication.
• Faster onboarding: They enable new developers or DevOps engineers as they can get productive right away. You no longer need to wait days or weeks to get clusters set up; HCP clusters are spun up in minutes, and you can get Vault or Consul credentials when you need them.
• Security best practices: HCP products are built with security. For instance, Vault is built and packaged with encryption at rest and encryption in transit out of the box, and Consul ships with secure-by-default configurations.

Core Components You’ll Need

• HCP account: Sign up at HCP and create a project. If you will pay, make sure you set up billing.
• Terraform installed: Next, install Terraform on your local machine. That’s downloadable from HashiCorp’s website.
•  Cloud provider access: Setting up credentials in your environment will require whether you’re using AWS, Azure, or whatever other supported platform. For AWS, make sure that your ~/.aws/credentials file is configured, for instance.
• HCP Terraform provider: HCP has an official Terraform provider: hashicorp/hcp. This is what we’ll be using to define our HCP resources in code.

Sample Use Case: Provisioning a Vault Cluster on HCP

Suppose you’re looking for a secure secrets management solution for your applications. HCP Vault offers a managed version of Vault and takes care of the installation, patching, and scaling. This simple example shows an example of Terraform configuration to deploy the HCP Vault cluster in AWS.

Step 1: Structure Your Terraform Project

Create a new folder for your Terraform configuration files:

mkdir hcp-terraform && cd hcp-terraform

Files such as main.tf, variables.tf and outputs.tf will keep living inside this directory and will define your infrastructure.

Step 2: Define Your Terraform Configuration (main.tf)

Below is an example configuration for provisioning an HCP Vault cluster and an HVN (HashiCorp Virtual Network) in AWS.

terraform {
  required_providers {
    hcp = {
      source  = "hashicorp/hcp"
      version = "~> 0.49"  # Use the latest version that suits your project
    }
  }
  required_version = ">= 1.0"
}

provider "hcp" {
  # Credentials can come from environment variables:
  # HCP_CLIENT_ID and HCP_CLIENT_SECRET
}

# 1. Create a HashiCorp Virtual Network (HVN) in AWS
resource "hcp_hvn" "example_hvn" {
  name           = "example-hvn"
  cloud_provider = "aws"
  region         = "us-east-1"
}

# 2. Create an HCP Vault cluster
resource "hcp_vault_cluster" "example_vault" {
  hvn_id                  = hcp_hvn.example_hvn.id
  cluster_name            = "example-vault-cluster"
  tier                    = "development"
  public_endpoint_allowed = true
}

# 3. Output the Vault address
output "vault_address" {
  value = hcp_vault_cluster.example_vault.public_endpoint_url
}

Notes

• hcp_hvn: This builds a private virtual network in your chosen cloud region, which is yours for your HashiCorp services alone.
• hcp_vault_cluster: This provision is a Vault instance in HCP, using the HVN specified.
• public_endpoint_allowed: If set to true, it means that you can be connected publicly (which is helpful for testing). In production, you’d want to peer this private network with the private network in your private cloud.

Step 3: Set Up Credentials

You can either set the HCP credentials as environment variables:

export HCP_CLIENT_ID="<your-hcp-client-id>"
export HCP_CLIENT_SECRET="<your-hcp-client-secret>"

Step 4: Initialize and Review

Initialize your Terraform project to download the necessary provider plugins:

terraform init

Next:

terraform plan

Step 5: Deploy Your Infrastructure

To create the HCP HVN and the Vault cluster, run:

terraform apply

Verifying the Deployment

HCP Dashboard

HashiCorp Cloud Platform: Log in and find your project. Once you have created the HVN and Vault cluster, you should see them.

Terraform Outputs

If you added the vault_address output to your configuration, then after a successful apply, Terraform will print out the Vault address. If you want, you can set the environment variable export VAULT_ADDR=<vault-address> or, if you prefer, directly interact with Vault at that address.

Testing Connectivity

If you allowed public endpoints, you can run:

vault status

Scaling and Updating

One good thing about IaC is that scaling or modifying configurations is as simple as one more Terraform command. If you want to:

• Upgrade your Vault tier (e.g., from development to standard_small),
• Add a new HVN,
• Enable region replication (for multi-region availability),

Just update your .tf files, terraform plan to see what’s changing, and then terraform apply it. Wherever possible, Terraform will make incremental, nondestructive modifications.

Conclusion

Using HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) together with Terraform enables you to significantly reduce the complexity of standing up and maintaining a comprehensive infrastructure set of tools such as Vault and Consul in a consistent, repeatable way. Terraform allows for consistent and repeatable IaC workflows, and HCP offloads day-to-day tasks of scaling, patching, and securing. More flexibility enables the scaling or the modification of services as the business evolves, it can drastically reduce the complexity of deploying and managing critical infrastructure tools like Vault and Consul. HCP offloads day-to-day operational tasks such as scaling, patching, and securing, while Terraform provides consistent, repeatable IaC workflows.

This approach translates directly to:

• Faster time-to-value for teams adopting Vault or Consul,
• Lower risk of misconfigurations or security oversights,
• Greater flexibility in scaling or modifying services as business needs evolve.

Give HCP a try if you’re interested but would rather not operate Vault or Consul. If you already use Terraform for your infrastructure, integrating HCP resources into your existing workflows should likely feel second nature to the reality of ‘infrastructure at your fingertips.’

Author’s Note: This brief guide provides a quick overview of deploying and managing the HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) using Terraform. Always test configurations in a non-production environment and consult official documentation to ensure best practices.