HashiCorp announced a new project at HashiConf Digital called Waypoint. Waypoint uses an HCL based configuration file to describe how to build, deploy, and release applications to various cloud platforms, ranging from Kubernetes to AWS to Google Cloud Run. Think of Waypoint as if Terraform and Vagrant came together to describe how to build, deploy, and release your applications.

True to form, Hashicorp released Waypoint as open source and with a lot of examples. The orchestration layer is up to you – Waypoint ships as a binary you can run right on your laptop or from whatever CI/CD orchestration tool you choose. Where you deploy is up to you as well since Waypoint shipped with support for Kubernetes, Docker, Google Cloud Run, AWS ECS, and a few others.

Using the fantastic Waypoint documentation and the excellent example applications that HashiCorp provided, we decided to take a look at orchestrating Waypoint using GitLab CI/CD. To do this, we’ll start from the simple AWS ECS Node.js app from the example repository.

#gitlab #git #web-development