Attending this year’s HashiConf was an unforgettable experience that exceeded all my expectations. Over the course of two days, I immersed myself in the vibrant energy of the community, connected with fellow HashiCorp Ambassadors, and shared in the excitement of new developments in the world of Terraform and cloud automation. From the inspiring keynotes and engaging sessions to the absolutely humbling experience of my book signing, every moment was a reminder of why I am so passionate about this field. Here’s a recap of my journey through HashiConf, filled with memorable interactions and insights that I hope you will find interesting to see the day in the life of a HashiCorp Ambassador.

Day One

On the first day, I went down for breakfast and then met the other ambassadors at the HashiCorp booth at 9:05 AM to secure our reserved seating for the Day One Keynote. The keynote was excellent, the MCs were smooth operators and Armon was as polished and articulate as ever.

I feel like the HCP Cloud, formerly known as the Terraform Cloud offering, is becoming more and more compelling. I’m very excited to try out the new stacks and see some of the deferred plan items. I’m looking forward to experimenting with it on HCP Cloud and hope to see these features come to the Terraform Community Edition as well. Some of the announcements, particularly around deferred plan and the way Armon specifically mentioned running terraform plan and terraform apply on the same module repeatedly to resolve known-after-apply items until the entire solution is deployed, make me think these features will be coming to the Community Edition. I noticed a distinct change in how features were framed this year versus last, which is very exciting for an avid user of Terraform Community Edition like myself. Not that I’m against HCP Cloud — in the past, I felt the value proposition wasn’t significant enough, but as it gets more sophisticated, I think the value prop will continue to erode the cost-benefit analysis between creating your own plumbing versus using HCP Cloud to do it for you.

The conference was abuzz, and I really liked the venue — the stage looked amazing. There was a really cool escape room inside a big inflated bubble; unfortunately, I didn’t get a chance to try it out because I was pulled in too many different directions. However, Glenn, Yu, and Marcelo Zambrana seemed to have a good time and were able to find a partner to take my place.

Around 12:30 PM, my book signing started, and I was extremely humbled by the turnout. People told me later that the line wrapped around all the escalators and almost went into the conference hall itself. Of course, I wasn’t able to see this as I was in the HashiCorp Ambassador space signing books and talking to their new owners.

I asked every recipient their name and their favorite cloud. Many of them noticed that I was wearing a Microsoft-branded full-zip jacket and were naturally a little hesitant to tell me an answer they thought I didn’t want to hear. We all had a good laugh, and I told them it’s okay — they were in a multi-cloud safe space. I realize that not everyone works at an organization where Azure is the primary cloud, but one of the nice things about Terraform is that you develop skills and knowledge that can translate to other platforms. We signed 88 books in one and a half hours.

I also had a special treat — although he hinted at it on the boat at the “HUG on the Harbor” that he might stop by, I wasn’t sure if he would find it in his schedule to do so. But to my pleasant surprise, Armon Dadgar was able to pop in for a few minutes and sign my personal copy of “Mastering Terraform”. He was kind enough to write the foreword to my book, and I’m even happier now that I have a signed copy from him to commemorate the milestone!

It was such a pleasure meeting so many enthusiastic current and future Terraformers, no matter what cloud platform they call home. Everyone was so nice and friendly, and I hope they find the book useful in their journey to infrastructure as code and cloud automation.

After the book signing, I managed to catch a few sessions. I went to Ned’s talk on module design and ended up agreeing with about 76% of it. I later joked with Ned about this. I thought it was a really good talk because there were such diverse opinions on the various topics, and I think it’s a conversation that we as the Terraform community have to have and will continue to have. It’s an extremely nuanced subject, and a lot depends on the context, which did come out during the talk. This is definitely an area where I think the community needs some more prescriptive guidance.

After the conference, we headed over to the party. All the ambassadors gathered in the lobby of the hotel and hopped on the first shuttle, which took us to a nearby shopping center with some pretty swanky restaurants. There was an area reserved in the back of one of the bars with pool tables and bowling alleys. I think the place was called Flight Club or Kings or something like that. Armon was there for a private meet and greet. I didn’t approach immediately because I didn’t want to seem too eager (maybe I think too much), and I wanted others to have a chance to speak with him and connect on that level. I got to meet Rosemary Wang for the very first time — she’s very nice, and I look forward to opportunities to collaborate with her in the future. I kept getting bumped by other ambassadors playing billiards, so Michael Kosir and I tried to get out of the way, which led us over to Armon’s table. It was a pretty nice, natural segwey into the conversation, Armon greeted me as an old friend and we I jumped into the conversation with the rest of the Ambassadors. We had a nice chat. Things got pretty technical and nerdy, which is too be expected but the energy was very jovial and we all had a few good laughs!

Matthias, Nathanael, François, and I closed down the pub with the last call. I probably had too much to drink, and we walked back to the Omni to prepare for the next day. I heard there was an after-party, but I didn’t check Ambassador Slack or any of my social media to see if anything was going on. Frankly, I was too tired from a long day.

Day Two

On day two, I woke up, had breakfast, met with the other Microsoft folks at the booth, and went over to get good seats for the Day Two Keynote. I actually sat front row with my colleagues Zijie and Ritesh, who runs the Singapore HUG.

We watched a photo slideshow, and I saw myself in quite a few photos, including one with my wife and Chris Williams photobombing us, which was pretty hilarious. Chris is just that kind of guy. I also saw myself wearing the Minecraft mask and a few other shots of me interacting with different people throughout the day. It was really nice to reflect back on all the memories of just yesterday.

Armon of course did a stellar job giving the Day 2 Keynote. The Security Lifecycle Management space isn’t really my wheelhouse but it’s interesting to hear what’s happening there. I was a little bit disappointed that Azure was not very present in the Day Two Keynote nor in the Day One Keynote. I also received feedback from Azure folks at the conference that there weren’t a lot of demos that included Azure in many (any?) of the talks. I hope I’m wrong about this — I didn’t get the see all the talks — nor am I maintaining a quota system but it definitely seems noticeable to me and others: the absence of our beloved cloud, Azure. That was a little bit sad for me to see, especially with Microsoft being a top-tier sponsor of the event. Of course, there’s no obligation for HashiCorp or any of the speakers to feature Azure in their demos, but it would have made me feel a little bit better to see more visibility for the platform that I love and work day in and day out to make better.

After the keynote, I went up to Level Five to do my hallway track. I couldn’t get Packer to run because I think outbound SSH was blocked, but I don’t think it mattered much. I’d already provisioned the Packer images that I needed and had provisioned an environment with Terraform. During the talk, I told everybody a little bit about Minecraft to set the table — how there’s a Bedrock Edition and a Java Edition, and that my talk was going to demonstrate the Java Edition because it’s the only one that runs on my Mac. I talked a little bit about how Minecraft is a fun way for people to learn infrastructure as code because you don’t get focused on the application and whether the application is right; you can focus purely on the automation techniques being used. I also thought Minecraft is a good example of how Terraform is so versatile that it can talk to pretty much anything, and that when doing complex infrastructure, there are multiple layers of control planes that you need to automate. In my demo, I demonstrated automating the Azure control plane and Minecraft as a control plane. Of course, on Azure, I’m provisioning a VM and virtual networks and public IP addresses and all those typical cloud things, but on the Minecraft control plane, I’m provisioning blocks in 3D space. The crowd seemed really engaged, and it was a lot of fun. I saw a lot of smiles, which really made me feel warm inside.

After my talk, I went downstairs and signed the remaining 12 copies of my book before meeting back up with the other Microsoft folks at the booth and saying some goodbyes.

We took the ambassador group photo at 1:15 PM, and I tried my best not to blink.

At 2:45 PM, I had an interview with Chris Williams for the HashiCorp social media. Chris has this funny way about him where it almost seems like he’s teasing me, but I actually think he’s trying to make me more comfortable by putting me on the spot a little bit in a friendly and funny way to help me get used to it. He started the interview and totally pretended like the cameras were rolling, and me being a total newbie, I had no idea that the cameras were not even rolling. He kind of led me to believe, jokingly, “Yeah, we’re rolling,” which was kind of scary but also broke the ice a little bit.

I got mic’d — they had to run the microphone down my back beneath my jacket and clip it to my belt. I’m not actually sure where the microphone was — on the back of my neck or on my lapel.

Chris had some questions prepared, but I tried not to think too deeply about what my answers were or write out an answer because I feel like it’ll be less authentic if I rehearse. Honestly, I’ve tried rehearsing in the past, and rehearsing just makes me sound like a robot, so I usually just conceptualize what my answer is and then respond off the cuff. He asked me about my book and why I wrote it and why I thought it was different. I said that I felt like a lot of times, prior to joining Microsoft, I saw people treat infrastructure as code as kind of a shotgun for the cloud, where they just shoot their environments into the cloud and then no longer manage those environments using infrastructure as code, in which case the code atrophies over time. Therefore, I wanted to bring that software development lifecycle or software development process mindset to the table. I also mentioned that, particularly from my consulting years, it’s important to meet the customer where they are, and many people don’t get a choice about what cloud platform they start using Terraform on, nor do they necessarily have a choice about what their next organization’s primary cloud might be. This is actually one of the strengths of Terraform, and if people actually learn how to navigate multiple clouds, it can absolutely amplify their marketability.

Chris also asked me what I thought infrastructure as code was going to look like in 5 to 10 years, and I said that in the short term, it would be nice if we could alleviate some of the burden of implementing the Terraform providers using AI. Maybe this would not completely eliminate the human tender loving care that goes into their development, but it could definitely help accelerate provider development and reduce the cost of maintenance significantly. I also mentioned the trend that layers of abstraction will be added. I think currently today, Terraform is kind of like the C or C++ layer, and likely we will see higher-level abstractions that developers will operate against above Terraform, similar to what Java or .NET is from a traditional development standpoint.

After that, I spent most of my time walking around, talking with people, talking with attendees, talking with other ambassadors, taking selfies, signing a few books that were straggling around, and saying final goodbyes to many of my Microsoft colleagues. I did see Armon one more time in passing and felt bold enough to say hey, but I think his executive assistant was hoping Armon would not have any further distractions as he seemed to have pressing business to attend to. But he did stop and shake my hand and say hello. He seems like an extremely busy guy and seems very blessed to have an executive assistant that helps him with everything. It would be a lot, but he definitely seems energized, in good spirits, and very focused.

This experience was one of my best HashiConf experiences. I feel like this year was even better than last year. People seemed a lot more excited, energetic, and optimistic. There were a lot of Azure folks that I bumped into, and they all seemed very excited about what the future will bring. I am very excited to see continued success for both Microsoft and HashiCorp, and I hope we can both partner well to thrill our customers by eliminating friction and helping them achieve more on the Azure platform through Terraform.

Until next time — Happy Azure Terraforming!!!