Waypoint is now available in beta on HashiCorp's Cloud Platform (HCP).
First released two years ago as an open-source project, Waypoint is a tool to give developers a consistent deployment experience on platforms such as Docker, Kubernetes, and Amazon ECS. A wide array of plugins provide backend support for deploying to these platforms with a single "waypoint up" command.
Waypoint being available now on HCP provides two main benefits. Firstly, the Waypoint server is fully-managed by HashiCorp, and secondly, the platform provides a user interface integrated directly into the HCP portal. Administrators are thus able to run Waypoint without having to run the infrastructure themselves, as Waypoint is now available alongside other HCP products such as Vault and Consul.
Waypoint integrates with an organization's existing workflows - both with Continuous Integration (CI) systems such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, and CircleCI, and also with the infrastructure-as-code tool Terraform. For deployment, Waypoint uses Cloud Native Buildpacks, as used in Heroku, Cloud Foundry, Google App Engine, and many other platform-as-a-service systems, tapping into a wide ecosystem embracing modern container standards.
The fully-managed Waypoint server allows users to build, deploy and release their apps either using simple CLI commands either on a developer's machine or inside an existing release system, or by automation using a Git integration. Waypoint can connect securely to an organization's infrastructure to deploy applications. Waypoint can deploy to HashiCorp's Nomad, to AWS (ECS or Lambda), Google Cloud Run, and to Azure Container Instances. Kubernetes deployments are taken care of by using either standard Kubernetes YAML files, using a Helm chart, or a simple plugin that just creates a Kubernetes "Deployment" and "Service".
Users of HCP benefit from more advanced security and access control with HCP. This allows a stronger security posture for organizations than with the open source project - with developers protected from access to infrastructure components thanks to HCP's guardrails.
Workspaces also provide isolation of multiple builds and deployments of the same application, for example, to deploy and release different Git branches to different environments, such as a feature branch or a staging environment.
Custom pipelines - recently added to the open-source Waypoint - are also available in HCP Waypoint. This gives developers a choice other than the opinionated "build, deploy, release" pipeline performed by Waypoint by default, for example by adding post-build tests, or security scans on built artifacts.
Similar products available include Spinnaker - incubated at Netflix and available as open-source, and Harness - another managed deployment service. The public beta of HCP Waypoint - not currently designed for supporting production environments - is available for signup for testing now.
