BOSTON -- HashiCorp has answers for IT pros seeking easier to use infrastructure-as-code and platform engineering tools, but for current Terraform customers, remaking existing environments comes with challenges.

Terraform Stacks, launched a year ago and moved to public beta this week, allows for grouping larger sets of Terraform configurations and their dependencies together than was previously possible and coordinating them across multiple infrastructure environments. So, for example, a Kubernetes cluster, an AWS virtual private cloud network and a Kubernetes application could be deployed and updated as a single unit.

With the beta release, Terraform Stacks also supports decoupling infrastructure components in new ways with deferred changes. Previously, Terraform would generate an error if users tried to set up a Kubernetes app configuration without first creating a Kubernetes cluster -- now, the two can be created independently. Finally, Terraform Stacks supports orchestration rules, a feature that targets platform engineers with support for automatically approving new infrastructure deployments in development environments, for example, but blocking them in production.

"What if Terraform is ... aware, not just of one config and one environment, one set of state files, but of a richer topology, where you might have multiple layers of components?" said Armon Dadgar, co-founder and CTO at HashiCorp, during a keynote presentation at HashiConf Tuesday. "It really does feel like Terraform 2.0 in many ways."

With this update, Terraform added module lifecycle management features, also in public beta, that include change requests platform engineers can issue to application teams, prompting them to move to newer versions of infrastructure or application templates. Those change requests come with a new team notification system that can automatically send emails and warning messages through the HashiCorp Cloud Platform (HCP) Terraform UI to make teams aware of the change request.

Another public beta feature broadens ephemeral workspace support to the project level, so that multiple workspaces can be automatically destroyed based on policy. HashiCorp's cloud-first push continues with a new custom Terraform provider, Terraform Migrate, that automatically generates HCP Terraform infrastructure code based on existing Terraform Community Edition HCL configurations.

HCP Waypoint is closely tied to these new features of Terraform. The developer platform service, made generally available this week, uses Terraform under the covers. New support for deferred changes, for example, means that Kubernetes applications and Kubernetes clusters can be separately configured while remaining linked together. But the Waypoint UI and a new API present catalogs of application templates, infrastructure projects and add-ons that shield application teams from code-level details.

Both products appear to be a response to newer competitors such as Harness, Pulumi and System Initiative that might tempt HashiCorp customers with ease of use, said Andi Mann, global CTO and founder of Sageable, a tech advisory and consulting firm in Boulder, Colo.

"Simplification, ease of deployment and collaboration with non-subject matter experts [is where] System Initiative but also some of the older startups are focused -- like Pulumi, for example, or Harness, they're really feature-competitive in a lot of ways," he said.