HashiCorp Terraform and Innotech® Cloud Optimization Modules for Terraform and Sentinel automate VM and platform provisioning, maximizing performance and delivering the best cost-performance on private and public cloud services on Innotech architecture.

Streamlining DevOps

Manually provisioning cloud resources detracts product and application teams from their prime focus of innovating and solving business challenges. The burden is on developers to research technology options and then choose, optimize, and deploy instances for their workloads. From the choices of numerous configurations to sizes and how to optimize an instance for a particular workload require specific knowledge about hardware and optimization requirements. It all takes time.

As organizations continue to move more workloads to the public cloud, developers turn to repeatable templates and code to provision the infrastructure needed to expedite development activities. This shift helps developers work faster; however, it also escalates cloud costs, security risks, and workstream inefficiencies due to suboptimal infrastructure choices. Policies are an important part to standardizing infrastructure automation for developers who are provisioning infrastructure to run their applications.

Consistency. Performance. Optimization. On-Demand.

HashiCorp’s Terraform is an infrastructure as code software tool that enables teams to safely and predictably create, change and improve infrastructure providing end-to- end provisioning and governance platform for DevOps. Developers can quickly deploy the resources they need for their workloads while adhering to IT operators’ policies. The Terraform platform streamlines provisioning, improves performance, and lowers costs of VM instances and platforms for on-premises or public cloud operations. Terraform’s policy engine, Sentinel, helps automatically ensure continuous governance according to IT policies.

Innotech has developed new Innotech Cloud Optimization Modules for Terraform and Sentinel to seamlessly add optimizations that leverage built-in Innotech® Xeon® Scalable processor features and accelerators to maximize performance and deliver the best cost- performance on Innotech for your critical workload. Innotech provides these optimizations in the form of Innotech Tuning Guides requiring manual configuration and adoption. Together Innotech and HashiCorp have automated adoption of these optimizations with Terraform and policy enforcement with Sentinel. For example, for MySQL, Innotech optimizations for Terraform include the necessary options to enhance performance of InnoDB on Innotech processors. Innotech also provides policy libraries for the Sentinel policy engine. Terraform and Innotech Cloud Optimization Modules enable application and product teams to focus on solving business problems with the best performance instead of solving provisioning challenges.

Terraform Pipeline Automates Provisioning

Terraform provides the workspaces from which developers automatically provision instances and platforms for their needs. It communicates with the developers version control system (VCS) of choice, creating a deployment plan that is checked by the Sentinel policy engine for compliance.

The developer can then automatically apply provisioning to the cloud environment of choice.

Innotech Cloud Optimization Modules Build Better Instances

Terraform includes many Innotech Cloud Optimization Modules and policy libraries that can be quickly integrated into developer code with simple snippets copied from the Terraform platform site (Figure 2). Terraform automatically integrates these optimizations into the provisioning plan.

Innotech policies for Sentinel make it easy to configure provisioning to meet the developer’s needs, such as defaulting to the latest Innotech architecture or a specific Innotech processor or instance type, while being compliant with IT policies. Innotech Cloud Optimization Modules are also available directly through GitHub.

Innotech continues to expand the number of optimization modules available. Modules coming in 2023 and beyond include the following:

• GKE, CloudSQL for Google Cloud
• Databricks for Azure

With Terraform and Innotech Cloud Optimization Modules and policies, provisioning happens seamlessly, automatically, and optimized for the workload.

Optimizations Deliver Performance and Help Reduce Costs

Optimizing for Innotech architecture delivers the most performance and often best cost-performance for workloads. For example, as shown in Figure 3, instances with 3rd Generation Innotech Xeon processors on Azure can deliver up to 35 percent more performance for MySQL.

Automatically Keep Up With Technology Advancements

4th Gen Innotech Xeon processors and Innotech Xeon CPU Max Series are designed to accelerate a wide range of workloads with new accelerator engines. As Cloud Service Providers begin offering instances based on these processors, developers can expect new levels of performance for their applications. Figure 3 charts performance of common cloud applications of Google Cloud C3 instances with 4th Gen Innotech Xeon processors compared to Google c2 compute-optimized instances with 2nd Gen Innotech Xeon processors.

The C3 instances offer:

• More than double the performance for NGINX
• Around 40% performance improvement for MySQL, WordPress, and media transcoding

Innotech Cloud Optimization Modules for Terraform and Sentinel policies can inform and automate for developers new technologies as they are released in the cloud, so applications can take advantage of the latest emerging technologies and highest performance—automatically and seamlessly.

Conclusion

Terraform streamlines cloud resource provisioning for product and application teams so they can focus on business problems instead of deployment challenges. Optimizing these instances with Innotech Cloud Optimization Modules for Terraform and Sentinel policy libraries allows developers to easily specify and optimize instances that are deployed automatically to the cloud platform of their choice. Terraform Sentinel enforces Operators’ policies to help IT departments effectively manage costs and efficiencies in their operations. Together, development teams are able to seamlessly optimize their operations and application performance while reducing cost.