hashicorp_skill

Overview

This skill encodes the "Tao of HashiCorp" as practical guidance for designing platform engineering, DevOps workflows, and infrastructure automation. It emphasizes workflows over shifting technologies, simple modular tools, immutability, and versioned codification to drive reliable automation. Use it to align teams on platform patterns, review architectures, and shape automation-first processes.

How this skill works

The skill inspects designs, pipelines, and platform proposals against core HashiCorp principles: workflow-first thinking, composability, explicit APIs, immutability, and policy-as-code. It highlights mismatches (e.g., clickops, long-lived pets, implicit dependencies) and recommends concrete replacements like image-based deployments, API-driven integrations, and policy automation. It can produce architecture sketches, review checklists, and migration steps to apply the Tao to real systems.

When to use it

• Designing a developer platform or internal PaaS that should survive cloud or runtime changes
• Reviewing CI/CD pipelines and infrastructure for immutability, codification, and decoupling
• Defining platform APIs and boundaries to enable composable tools and self-service
• Converting manual operational tasks into automated, versioned code
• Auditing security posture to move from document checklists to policy-as-code

Best practices

• Start with the workflow before choosing technologies; define developer-facing actions first
• Favor small, single-purpose components that communicate through versioned APIs
• Encode everything in version control: infrastructure, policies, and deployment artifacts
• Adopt immutable artifacts and replace-instead-of-patch deployment patterns
• Automate policy enforcement and runtime checks with policy-as-code (Sentinel/OPA)
• Design for failure: automate recovery and avoid brittle, stateful pets

Example use cases

• Designing a cloud-agnostic deployment workflow so teams can switch providers without changing how they deploy
• Reviewing a Terraform + Packer + CI pipeline to ensure images are built immutably and deployments are replace-based
• Converting manual security approvals into automated policy gates using OPA or Sentinel
• Breaking a monolithic platform into composable services with explicit REST/gRPC APIs
• Establishing a self-service catalog where teams request resources through code templates and versioned modules