Accelerate Platform Operations with HashiCorp Terraform and Dell Storage

By Brad Maltz, senior director, DevOps and developer relations ecosystems, Dell Technologies, Inc.

Organizations that have shifted toward the DevOps operating model are somewhere along their automation journey. As they continue to upskill their system administrators and grapple with cloud expenditures, their goal is to simplify the infrastructure technologies to deliver a platform-level outcome ‘for all.’ Over the years, platform engineering and operations have emerged through the simplification infrastructure-as-code tools have provided, with tools like Ansible and Terraform emerging as forerunners in the market. In recent years, Dell has enabled Ansible to completely support the company’s product portfolio.

Now, Dell has partnered with HashiCorp to ensure users can add Terraform use cases to a customer automation catalogue, which can drive a declarative set of outcomes. We announce the availability of Terraform Providers for PowerStore and PowerFlex.

“By 2025, 95% of enterprises will fail to realize full value from their DevOps/DevSecOps initiatives, if they don’t adopt platform engineering approaches.” ⁽¹⁾

In enterprise environments, it is not a stretch to think there are multiple pockets of DevOps culture in addition to ever-expanding application development. Even while DevOps organizations are working toward more centralized outcomes, they still experience rogue efforts they haven’t yet absorbed or aligned. This is where the benefits of bringing automation into IT Ops introduces easier, repeatable processes anyone can employ at will and with efficiency and speed.

Increase efficiency and accelerate outcomes
In our Dell engineering realm, our developers are assuring that while we onboard tools like Terraform, we provide a consistent, standardized REST API model across all our offers and proven technologies. Reducing manual tasks through these initiatives becomes even easier, increasing efficiency. Adding automation also reduces lengthy deployments and wait times from IT to receive infrastructure needs such as storage and the solutions customers choose. Additionally, platform engineers and SREs can apply and improve compliance and reduce configuration errors, lowering risks across the environment. By providing access to storage quickly, end users now have real-time access to volumes, snapshots and the management thereof.

Operate declaratively at scale
Dell-developed Terraform Providers enable storage resource automation to provision and deploy arrays following declarative principles. Declarative automation is transformative for the end user who doesn’t need to know the steps to get to a desired result. It becomes ‘auto-magic’ to the receiver. With PowerStore’s flexible, software-driven architecture and PowerFlex out-of-the-box toolsets, Terraform Providers can access resources quickly to manage basic functions of storage that application developers and end users need on demand without the wait time.

Destination – Platform engineering
If ‘Agile and DevOps are for harnessing integration, interaction, and innovation, ^(²) then platform engineering and operations must be the overarching judge of continuity and balance across enterprises. With Dell Technologies empowering user choice, portfolio automation will continue to emerge. Get started and learn more from our Developer Relations team and engineers at our blog space.

These Terraform Providers can be found alongside our other supported open-source automation tools available and accessible here.

Also available on the Terraform registry at Terraform Registry Dell Technologies | Terraform Registry.

⁽¹⁾ Gartner – Predicts 2023 Collaborate, Automate and Orchestrate to Optimize Costs and Value During the Economic Crisis, November 1, 2022
⁽²⁾ Pearl Zhu, author, The Digital Master