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

This guide is for platform engineers, infrastructure architects, DevOps administrators, and cloud operators who design and deploy Terraform Enterprise in cloud, datacenter, or private-cloud environments. After deployment, operators should use the Terraform Administration Guide for day-2 operation of Terraform Enterprise and HCP Terraform, and practitioners should use the Terraform User Guide for infrastructure provisioning workflows.

Note

HCP Terraform is a SaaS service operated by HashiCorp and does not require installation by customers. HCP Terraform readers should start with the Terraform Administration Guide for shared service operations and the Terraform User Guide for consumption workflows.

Language and definitions

HashiCorp is an enabler of multi-cloud strategies, and as such we take this into account when writing designs. While we aim to use technology-agnostic terminology, the document primarily supports the three largest cloud service providers (CSPs) together with an on-premise/datacenter architecture. There are some terms which do not translate between the public cloud and the datacenter. For the sake of clarity, our definitions for these terms are below.

Term	Definition
Availability zone	A separate failure domain within a logical datacenter.
Region	A separate logical datacenter.
Public subnet	A network accessible from the public Internet, containing publicly addressable infrastructure.
Private subnet	A network not accessible from the public Internet and whose infrastructural objects are either blocked from connecting to the public Internet or do through a NAT gateway.