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What is HCP Waypoint?

HCP Waypoint is a HashiCorp-managed continuous delivery tool that automates and simplifies the process of deploying your web applications into your infrastructure. It allows you to manage your application lifecycle without maintaining a Waypoint server and associated infrastructure.

How does HCP Waypoint work?

HCP Waypoint is a single tool that exposes only the actions that developers need so that they can achieve a consistent end-to-end deployment experience. It enables you to build your application, push it to a registry, direct your infrastructure to run it properly, and release it to the Internet–all without requiring expertise in each tool associated with those processes, such as Docker, kubectl, and aws.

HCP Waypoint employs the following workflow:

  1. Developers use the HCP Waypoint CLI or UI to issue commands to the HCP Waypoint server.
  2. The server assigns jobs to HCP Waypoint runners, which are processes that instruct the infrastructure to build, deploy, or release an application.
  3. Waypoint also provides applications with a custom entrypoint binary, which communicates with the Waypoint server to provide logs and fetch config.

The following diagram shows the HCP Waypoint architecture:

Overview of HCP Waypoint architecture and workflow

HCP Waypoint provides the following benefits:

  • Automation: You can direct Waypoint to automatically trigger the build, deploy, and release processes based on changes in your Git provider. You can also integrate Waypoint into your existing CI process to trigger deployments after tests are complete, which supports reliability, traceability, and efficiency within your CI pipeline.
  • Visibility: HCP Waypoint removes the need to dig through CI logs or the underlying infrastructure by providing visibility into your application's current health status and deployment history through the UI and CLI.
  • Security: Grant access to runners, which are Waypoint components that execute operations, instead of giving developers access to operate the infrastructure. This allows developers to perform only the actions related to their applications from the HCP Waypoint interface. With HCP Waypoint mediating infrastructure access, permissions can be easily granted and revoked.
  • Access control: HCP Waypoint uses the HCP authentication system, which creates a seamless onboarding experience for your developers. It integrates with Terraform Cloud, which allows you to reference your existing Terraform-defined infrastructure in your HCP Waypoint configurations.

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