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Specialised financial technology company Synthesis Software Technologies (Synthesis) is pleased to announce a partnership with Hashicorp.

Founded by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar in 2012, HashiCorp is a leading multi-cloud automation software company that is based in San Francisco and has the goal of creating the Cloud Operating Model, revolutionising data centre management across application development, delivery, and maintenance. Its products aim to solve development, operations, and security challenges in infrastructure so organisations can focus on business-critical tasks.

The HashiCorp product suite facilitates the development and deployment of large-scale service orientated software installations. Every product in the suite addresses a specific need throughout the DevOps lifecycle and focusses on enabling self-service infrastructure throughout an organisation.

The HashiCorp suite consists of:

• Vagrant – Enables the building and maintenance of reproducible software-development environments via virtualisation technology;
• Packer – Enables the building of virtual machine images;
• Terraform – Enables infrastructure as code across several cloud and SaaS (software-as-a-service) platforms;
• Consul – Enables distributed KV storage, DNS-based service discovery, RPC, and event propagation;
• Vault – Enables secrets management, identity-based access, and encrypting application data for auditing of secrets for applications, systems, and users; and
• Nomad – Enables scheduling and deployment of tasks across worker nodes in a cluster.

Since 2010, all HashiCorp’s foundational technologies have been open source and developed using open standards. Some products have enterprise-specific feature sets that are available through the purchase of an additional license.

The tide of companies going through digital transformations to adopt new technologies such as cloud and DevOps philosophies is rising and presenting new challenges along the way. From development to IT operations, companies need to critically evaluate how they build not only for the present but for the future as well. In order to succeed with a cloud journey, the adoption of DevOps techniques of self-service infrastructure is critical.

Giving developers access to provision their own infrastructure may be daunting, especially in a large regulated environment. To address this, organisations often need to enforce policies on the type of infrastructure created, how it is used, and which teams get to use it. Using HashiCorp’s Sentinel policy as code framework, provides compliance and governance without requiring a shift in the overall team workflow. And because it is defined as code, it enables collaboration and comprehension for DevSecOps.

For self-service IT, the decoupling of the template-creation process and the provisioning process greatly reduces the time taken for any application to go live. This is because developers no longer need to wait for operations approval if they use a pre-approved template.

Synthesis became HashiCorp partners in June 2019 as both a System Integrator and Reseller. This will enable Synthesis to accelerate organisations through their cloud adoption and migration journeys to enable teams to work more efficiently using the best tools available while reducing operational overhead.

“Scaled learning – the sharing of knowledge and lessons learnt – is essential during the cloud journey of a large organisation. The ability to turn good peer reviewed code into modules, something which HashiCorp’s Terraform enables, not only helps developers build faster but can also have a significant impact on the security and governance posture of an organisation” says Jared Naude, Synthesis Security Engineer

“I am extremely excited by the momentum in South Africa, the number of organisations already using our OSS technology, and now realising the fundamental advantage of utilising our enterprise toolset for their policy, audit, and regulatory requirements. Partnering in the region gives us an opportunity to increase our scale, and working with Synthesis who has great reach into the Enterprise organisations who are seeing benefit from our technology means we’re able to bring solutions and services to the local market,” says Mark Mason, Senior Director, Alliances – International.

“Helping customers deliver innovation and migrate from their legacy environments into the cloud requires strategic partnerships with global organisations that have best practice experience to get it done as efficiently as possible. Providing unique local insights, we are excited about this partnership with HashiCorp as we work together to drive cloud adoption even more in the region,” says Michael Shapiro, Synthesis Managing Director.

ENDS