Introduction

Note

These guides were reorganized in August 2026. The previous Solution Design Guide and Operating Guides (Adoption, Standardization, Scaling) have been replaced with three role-based guide types: Installation, Administration, and User. Read the HVD 2.0 release notes for full details on what changed and where to find the content you need.

Why use HashiCorp Validated Designs?

HashiCorp Validated Designs (HVD) provide practitioners with opinionated guidance for achieving production-grade deployments of HashiCorp products. These designs are purpose-built for delivering foundational use cases, with a baseline level of architectural and operational maturity. They draw on the field experiences of Solutions Engineers and Solutions Architects working with customers across a wide range of environments and organizational requirements.

Each guide provides access to an opinionated reference architecture, including key design decisions and the rationale behind them. Where applicable, guides identify modular design components that you can adjust to align with organizational or regulatory requirements without compromising the overall integrity of the implementation. For many deployments we include Terraform modules to automate large portions of infrastructure provisioning and software installation.

Audience

The Terraform Administration Guide is for platform teams operating HCP Terraform or Terraform Enterprise as a shared service. It assumes the Terraform platform is already available: HCP Terraform is provided by HashiCorp as SaaS, and Terraform Enterprise self-hosted deployments have completed the Installation Guide.

For practitioner workflows such as infrastructure provisioning, imports, private-registry consumption, policy enforcement during runs, run-task results, continuous validation, workspace notifications, no-code module consumption, and ephemeral workspaces, see the Terraform User Guide.

Note

Terraform Enterprise-only operations, including backup, restore, failover, and self-hosted infrastructure responsibilities, are marked explicitly. HCP Terraform is operated by HashiCorp; HCP-specific guidance is called out inline where relevant.