Infrastructure Life Cycle Management

Written on 04/28/2025
Terraform Academy Team - Source Hashicorp

Infrastructure Life Cycle Management (ILCM) is the discipline of managing infrastructure—from initial design and provisioning through scaling, maintenance, and decommissioning—in a way that ensures security, reliability, and alignment with business needs. Within the HashiCorp ecosystem, ILCM is not only codified, but modular, cloud-agnostic, and automation-first.

 

HashiCorp enables organizations to manage the entire infrastructure life cycle using a suite of purpose-built tools:

 

  • Terraform provisions, updates, and destroys infrastructure using declarative configuration files (Infrastructure as Code).

  • Vault manages secrets, certificates, and encryption workflows across all phases of the infrastructure life cycle.

  • Consul provides service discovery, network segmentation, and dynamic configuration for distributed systems.

  • Nomad orchestrates workloads and applications consistently across different environments.

 

 

Together, these tools allow for a modular, loosely coupled life cycle that reflects the realities of modern, multi-cloud and hybrid infrastructure.

 


 

 

Why This Matters

 

 

Traditional infrastructure management is often fragmented, manual, and error-prone. HashiCorp’s tools bring structure and automation to each stage of the life cycle:

 

  1. Plan and define infrastructure with version-controlled code (Terraform).

  2. Provision and enforce access controls with policy-based automation (Terraform + Vault).

  3. Secure runtime environments with dynamic secrets and encryption (Vault).

  4. Monitor and adapt system health through service networking and health checks (Consul).

  5. Scale or retire resources safely with consistent workflows across clouds and environments (Nomad + Terraform).

 

 

HashiCorp’s approach to ILCM supports both developer velocity and enterprise governance, enabling infrastructure teams to move quickly without sacrificing security or compliance.