Weekly Journal 13 - Boundary, Waypoint

Synopsis

With Easter just around the corner, this week was short and most of my time was spent with activities for the end of the quarter. I managed to watch a couple of videos for two new Hashicorp tools, but that was about the extent of my technical work for the week.

Boundary

First up is Boundary. Boundary is service/framework for unifying authentication and authorization to your systems. If I am understanding it correctly, it integrates with an existing identity provider, and then injects the necessary credentials into the target system as part of the user session. This is supposed to eliminate the need to issue and manage individual credentials like SSH keys and VPN logins. The tool is still fairly new and is under active development, but I am very interested to see how it improves in the future.

Waypoint

I also took a quick look at Waypoint. Waypoint is a tool to manage deployment and release workflows as part of a Continuous Delivery pipeline. It creates a unified approach to managing deployment processes across platforms like Kubernetes, Nomad, virtual machines, and serverless hosts. I am excited by the way it separates deployment from release. It purports to support multiple release strategies like blue-green and canaries. This tool is very new and therefore has limited support for tools and platforms, but I will be keeping an eye its development.

What’s Next?

This coming week will be mostly consumed with planning and kicking off work for the next quarter. After this things should settle down a little and I can get back into the groove of doing some technical work. By the way things are looking, I will be working with some security tooling that should give me plenty to blog about.