Deepening The Synergy: HashiCorp and Traefik Labs’ Journey Toward a Seamless Cloud-Native Stack
Cloud-native infrastructure is evolving rapidly, with agility, security, and scalability increasingly becoming key table stakes. As such, organizations are constantly seeking integrated solutions to streamline their operations, and HashiCorp and Traefik Labs are one of the best examples of a deep integration between two stacks. What began with early integrations, with Traefik Proxy and Hashicorp Consul, has matured into a deep symbiosis of technologies with the addition of Traefik Enterprise, Traefik Hub, Hashicorp Vault and HashiCorp Nomad. Traefik Labs being recognized as the “2022 HashiCorp Integration Partner of the Year” showcases this strong unity that helps enterprises architect modern cloud-native infrastructures with ease.
The Early Days
The foundation of this partnership was laid with the integration of HashiCorp Consul into Traefik Proxy, Traefik Labs’ open-source reverse proxy and ingress controller. As early as Traefik’s inception back in 2015, the team at Traefik Labs was embracing service discovery and dynamic configuration patterns. Obviously, Consul from HashiCorp, was a natural fit.
At its core, Consul is designed to handle service discovery, health checks, and distributed system coordination across environments, making it the perfect complement to Traefik’s dynamic routing capabilities. Consul is integrated as a KV store and as a service catalog within Traefik, offering the maximum flexibility to fit companies’ needs.
As enterprises adopted cloud-native infrastructures, this combination of Traefik’s efficient ingress management and Consul’s robust service discovery made the duo indispensable in production environments.
Growing the Partnership
The expansion of both companies’ business offerings created the opportunity to deepen this collaboration, particularly with the introduction of Traefik Enterprise and HashiCorp’s Vault and Nomad into the mix.
Traefik Enterprise & HashiCorp Vault: Security has become an increasingly critical concern for organizations as they shift to microservices-based architectures. Vault, HashiCorp’s flagship solution for secrets management, integrates seamlessly with Traefik Enterprise, enabling enterprises to securely manage sensitive data. Companies can leverage Vault PKI as a TLS certificate resolver in Traefik Enterprise or can unlock the potential of a fully distributed ACME (Let’s Encrypt) setup. This is particularly essential in highly dynamic production environments, where breaches of sensitive data can be catastrophic.
Traefik Enterprise & HashiCorp Nomad: HashiCorp’s Nomad, a highly efficient workload orchestrator, became another pivotal piece in the collaboration. Designed to work across cloud and on-premises environments, Nomad excels at scheduling and managing containerized services at scale. Paired with Traefik Enterprise, this combination ensures that workloads are automatically discovered and routed without downtime or manual updates.
Nomad’s orchestration, when aligned with Traefik’s smart routing, delivers a streamlined solution for managing microservices, making deployment and scaling more seamless than ever before. This integration is particularly valuable for organizations looking for flexible, multi-cloud deployment options while maintaining high performance and operational efficiency.
Together, these integrations create a secure, highly automated, and flexible platform that enables enterprises to deploy, scale, and manage applications across any environment. With Traefik Enterprise and HashiCorp’s Vault and Nomad, organizations can achieve greater levels of automation while maintaining security, simplifying operations, and minimizing human intervention.
Maturing the Partnership
Traefik Hub & HashiCorp Vault: The maturity of the HashiCorp-Traefik Labs partnership reached a new level with the introduction of Traefik Hub, the industry's first Kubernetes-native API Management solution for publishing, securing, and managing APIs. Traefik Hub represents the most advanced solution in Traefik Labs’ portfolio, providing end-to-end API management that supports complex environments at scale. Built on the foundations of Traefik Enterprise’s proven routing technology, Traefik Hub API Gateway integrates deeply with Vault to offer an automated TLS certificate PKI for all APIs handled by Traefik Hub. The Hub & Vault combo provides the most advanced and secured API Gateway solution on the market.
Traefik Proxy/Hub & HashiCorp Nomad: The Nomad integration into Traefik Proxy and Traefik Hub continues to be improved and the latest Traefik v3.2 release brings a new watch option to the Nomad provider which refreshes the configuration on a per-event basis instead of the less effective pull mechanism.
Finally, both companies have been working hand in hand to publish a workload modernization integration guide with Traefik Enterprise to embed an API Gateway into Hashicorp Nomad clusters running Consul and Vault. The idea was to create a definitive guide for operation, platform and security teams to deploy a modern platform to seamlessly and securely publish APIs.
The impact? Outstanding success stories from clients across the world, highlighted recently by BT Group:
“We adopted Traefik OSS to help build a new container platform on HashiCorp Nomad in AWS, following the closure of one of our on-prem data centers. We needed something that integrated smoothly with Consul and had minimal overhead while handling spikes in demand during major events. Traefik's seamless integration with Consul made it easy to implement, and it’s been so reliable that we rarely have to think about it. As our platform grew, we needed to support more use cases around security and wanted operational support, which led us to adopt Traefik Hub. Being able to secure our APIs quickly by adding a few Consul tags has been a huge time-saver—our teams can focus on development without worrying about complex configuration.” ⎯ Tom Davies, Principal Software Engineer, BT Group
Conclusion
The deep integration of HashiCorp and Traefik Labs stacks has been transformative for enterprises navigating the complexities of cloud-native environments. With the synergy between Traefik Enterprise, Vault, and Nomad already providing robust solutions for secure microservices orchestration, the introduction of Traefik Hub represents a leap forward in API management.
This partnership continues to evolve, driving innovation in cloud-native technologies and creating tools that allow enterprises to thrive in an era where security, automation, and flexibility are key. As this collaboration deepens, the future of cloud-native infrastructure looks more agile, resilient, and secure than ever before. Visit our Traefik & HashiCorp page to learn more.
