Originally reported by devops.com based on announcements at HashiConf EU 2019.
Overview
At its HashiConf EU 2019 conference, HashiCorp announced a series of product updates designed to extend its infrastructure automation toolchain beyond cloud-native DevOps teams into traditional, ITIL-based IT departments. The common theme across the announcements was a push toward a single, consistent set of tools that works across legacy on-premises environments, modern Kubernetes clusters, and everything in between.
Terraform Enterprise Integrates with ServiceNow Service Catalog
The most significant announcement for legacy IT shops was an integration between Terraform Enterprise and the ServiceNow Service Catalog. ServiceNow is widely used by IT operations teams that follow ITIL-based workflows — a process model common in enterprises that predate the DevOps era.
With this integration, IT administrators working inside ServiceNow can invoke Terraform Enterprise to provision infrastructure without writing Terraform code or understanding the underlying automation mechanics. According to HashiCorp CTO Armon Dadgar, the goal is to eliminate the requirement for a dedicated infrastructure engineer to handle provisioning tasks — putting that capability directly in the hands of the IT administrators who manage service requests day to day.
This is a meaningful shift in positioning for Terraform Enterprise. Rather than being a tool adopted exclusively by platform engineering or DevOps teams, it becomes infrastructure automation infrastructure that existing ITIL-workflow teams can consume through familiar interfaces.
VCS-Backed Policy Sets for Governance in GitOps Workflows
HashiCorp also announced that Sentinel policy sets in Terraform Enterprise can now be sourced directly from version control systems (VCS), including:
- GitHub
- GitLab
- Bitbucket
Previously, policy management required more manual configuration. Pulling policies from a VCS means teams can treat governance rules as code — versioned, peer-reviewed, and auditable — alongside the infrastructure definitions they govern.
A practical use case highlighted by Dadgar: limiting the number of virtual machines a developer is permitted to spin up as part of a GitOps workflow. Centralizing those guardrails in a VCS-backed policy set makes enforcement consistent across teams and environments without requiring manual intervention by a platform administrator each time a new workspace is created.
Consul Gets Layer 7 Traffic Management and Nomad Integration
On the networking side, HashiCorp announced enhancements to HashiCorp Consul, its service mesh and service discovery tool. The two headline additions were:
- Layer 7 application traffic management — enabling more sophisticated routing decisions based on HTTP headers, path prefixes, and other application-layer attributes, rather than purely IP/port-level (Layer 4) routing.
- Integration with HashiCorp Nomad — allowing Consul’s service mesh capabilities to work natively with Nomad-scheduled workloads, extending service mesh benefits to teams that use Nomad as their cluster scheduler rather than Kubernetes.
Consul’s ability to run across both legacy VM-based environments and Kubernetes clusters is central to HashiCorp’s positioning. Most enterprises simultaneously operate monolithic applications on traditional infrastructure and microservices on container platforms. Consul is designed to provide consistent service discovery and connectivity across both, rather than requiring separate tooling for each environment.
The Broader Strategy: One Toolchain Across All IT Classes
Taken together, the HashiConf EU 2019 announcements reflect a deliberate strategic direction for HashiCorp: build a portfolio of tools that meet IT teams where they are, rather than demanding a full DevOps transformation as a prerequisite for adoption.
Dadgar acknowledged the reality that most organizations are not fully DevOps-native. The barriers to faster transformation include skills gaps, organizational inertia, and the practical difficulty of migrating legacy systems that still run critical workloads. For these organizations, an all-or-nothing approach to modernization is not viable.
HashiCorp’s answer is incremental adoptability. Teams can introduce Terraform, Consul, Vault, or Nomad at whatever layer and pace their organization supports — and the tools are designed to interoperate across legacy and modern environments rather than requiring a clean-slate migration.
Bottom-Up Adoption and the Accessibility Imperative
Dadgar noted that infrastructure tooling is still predominantly adopted from the bottom up — individual engineers or teams introduce tools because they solve immediate problems, not because an executive has mandated a platform strategy. In that environment, accessibility matters enormously.
If a tool requires deep expertise to operate, adoption stays narrow. By extending Terraform Enterprise into ServiceNow’s UI, and by sourcing policies from familiar VCS platforms, HashiCorp is reducing the skill-level barrier for IT administrators who are not infrastructure engineers by trade.
This approach also hedges against the risk of fragmentation. When different teams adopt different tools to solve the same problem, the long-term cost is higher operational complexity and harder-to-enforce governance. A common toolchain that spans ITIL and DevOps workflows gives IT leadership a plausible path toward standardization — without requiring a disruptive mandate to get there.
Key Takeaways
- Terraform Enterprise + ServiceNow: IT admins in ITIL shops can now trigger infrastructure provisioning through the ServiceNow Service Catalog, without needing Terraform expertise directly.
- VCS-backed Sentinel policies: Policy-as-code governance can now be version-controlled in GitHub, GitLab, or Bitbucket, supporting GitOps-style policy management in Terraform Enterprise.
- Consul Layer 7 + Nomad: Consul’s service mesh now supports application-layer traffic management and integrates with Nomad for teams not running Kubernetes.
- Unified toolchain strategy: HashiCorp is explicitly targeting mixed legacy/modern environments, positioning its tools as infrastructure-agnostic rather than cloud-native only.