Today, VMblog spoke with env0 Co-founder and CTO Omry Hay to learn more about their news announcement around Terratag.
VMblog: You
announced Terratag today. Can you tell us more about it?
Omry Hay: Terratag is an
open-source automation tool specifically designed to help developers and DevOps
teams avoid the pain of manual resource tagging.
Resource tagging is
critical for infrastructure provisioning but has always been one of the most
time-consuming and error-prone aspects of DevOps. Even when managing
infrastructure-as-code in Terraform, tagging is an involved, lengthy
process. Currently in order to execute a
tagging strategy, DevOps engineers first create it manually in their Terraform
code. This process easily generates human error, particularly when the user is
required to keep track of each and every change in a fast-growing code base.
Terratag automates the
way Terraform users tag their cloud resources to improve visibility into their
cloud costs and enable them to create standards within the company when it
comes to tagging and labeling resources to backtrack their cloud usage.
VMblog: How
will Terratag help the Terraform community?
Hay: Terratag helps users of
Terraform automate one of the most time-consuming aspects of infrastructure
deployment, allowing developers to code rather than spend time tagging
resources. It also helps promote the benefits of infrastructure-as-code
architecture, making IaC adoption more useful to teams using legacy infrastructure
and developers testing out proof of concept deployments.
We've been lucky enough
to be part of the passionate Terraform community since founding env0 and wanted
to give back to the groups and individuals who have helped us develop and test
our self-service cloud environments platform.
That's why Terratag isn't built to be proprietary, but available to the open
source community at large. Licensed under Mozilla Public License V2.0, Terratag
automatically tags infrastructure resources; cutting down on errors and time
spent tagging.
VMblog: How
does env0 track cloud costs and why is automatic tagging of cloud resources
important?
Hay: At env0, we believe that it's critical for individual
developers and enterprises to track their own cloud costs, especially when
using infrastructure-as-code.
IaC is a powerful technology that enables developers to
provision and manage any cloud resource in an automated, declarative way.
However, IaC also makes it far too easy to create massive cloud cost damage.
With a simple code modification, configuration change, or API call, a developer
can initiate a very expensive orchestration of unneeded cloud resources.
Our approach is to combine both orchestration and cloud management
into a single platform, offering proactive environment governance and deeper
cloud cost insights without any additional manual work. Currently, there's no
good way to give developers insight into how much their cloud deployments cost.
By providing self service infrastructure tools and immediate and easy
visibility into existing cloud spend, automated resource tagging along with
enforced budgets and other controls, we strive to provide the whole team with
greater responsibility for delivering more efficient infrastructure.
VMblog: How
will Terratag make DevOps and infrastructure teams more effective?
Hay: DevOps and infrastructure
teams today wear many hats. They are expected to be release managers and
evangelists one day, compliance and security managers the next, then developers
or QA testers, etc. It's a lot of different tasks that can easily take up time
and resources.
We want to streamline
part of their job by simplifying one of the most time-consuming tasks without
losing the insights needed to securely manage modern infrastructure
environments. The DevOps process was originally adopted to improve IT
efficiency and we want to take that to the next level by improving
infrastructure provisioning and help teams more efficiently manage their
infrastructure.
VMblog: Anything
else VMblog readers should know?
Hay: If you're a Terraform
user interested in trying Terratag, you can find all the files on GitHub at https://github.com/env0/terratag.
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