Recent and related:<p><i>IBM nearing a buyout deal for HashiCorp, source says</i> - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303</a> - April 2024 (170 comments)
Well, it was nice while it lasted! HashiCorp always felt like a company made by actual engineers, not "bean counters". Now it will just be another cog in the IBM machine, slowly grinding it down, removing everything attractive, just like RedHat and CentOS.<p>Hopefully this will create a new wave off innovation, and someone will create something to replace the monopoly on IaC that IBM now owns.
I think it's ok to tell this story now. Long long time ago when I was still at DO, I tried to buy HashiCorp. Well, I use "tried to buy" very loosely. It was when we were both pretty small startups, Joonas our Dir. Eng at the time was really into their tooling, thought it was very good plus Armon and Mitch are fantastic engineers. So I flew out from NYC to SF to meet with them "to talk". Well, I had no idea how to go about trying to buy a company and they didn't really seem that interested in joining us, so we stood around a grocery store parking lot shuffling our feet talking about how great Mitch and Armon are at building stuff and then I flew home. I think that's about as loosely as it gets when it comes to buying a company. Probably would have been a cool combo tho, who knows. Either way, they're great guys, super proud of them. <3
Hashi never sold me on the integration of their products, which was my primary issue with not selecting them. Each is independently useful, and there is no nudge to combine them for a 1+1=3 feature set.<p>Kubernetes was the chasm. Owning the computing platform is the core of utilizing Vault and integrating it.<p>The primary issue was that there was never a "One Click" way to create an environment using Vagarent, Packer, Nomad, Vault, Waypoint, and Boundry for a local developer-to-prod setup. Because of this, everyone built bespoke, and each component was independently debated and selected. They could have standardized a pipeline and allowed new companies to get off the ground quickly. Existing companies could still pick and choose their pieces. On both, you sell support contracts.<p>I hope they do well at IBM. Their cloud services' strategy is creating a holistic platform. So, there is still a chance Hashi products will get the integration they deserve.
Back in 2015 I discovered a security issue with some Dell software[1]. I remember vividly getting an email about a job opportunity based entirely on this from a company with a strange name, that after some googling made a thing called Vagrant. They seemed super nice but I was <i>far</i> too young and immature to properly evaluate the opportunity, so after a few emails I ghosted them out of fear of the unknown. In 2015 they had 50 employees and had just raised a 10 million series A[2].<p>Regardless of various things that have happened, or things that could have been, the company has pushed the envelope with some absolute bangers and we are <i>all</i> better for it, directly or indirectly.<p>Regardless of what the general opinion is of Hashicorp’s future post-IBM, they made an impact and that should be celebrated, not decried or sorrowed over for lack of a perceived picture perfect ending.<p>Such is life.<p>1. <a href="https://tomforb.es/blog/dell-system-detect-rce-vulnerability/" rel="nofollow">https://tomforb.es/blog/dell-system-detect-rce-vulnerability...</a><p>2. <a href="https://www.hashicorp.com/about/origin-story" rel="nofollow">https://www.hashicorp.com/about/origin-story</a>
Official: <a href="https://newsroom.ibm.com/2024-04-24-IBM-to-Acquire-HashiCorp-Inc-Creating-a-Comprehensive-End-to-End-Hybrid-Cloud-Platform" rel="nofollow">https://newsroom.ibm.com/2024-04-24-IBM-to-Acquire-HashiCorp...</a><p>Confirming what everybody knows, IBM views HashiCorp's products as Terraform, Vault, and some other shit.
I expected this when the terraform license changed. Not IBM specifically but it was obvious they weren't interested/ able to continue with their founding vision.
Certainly an interesting turn of events. I really enjoy using Terraform (and Terraform cloud) for work but the license changes made me cautious to integrate anymore.
> By joining IBM, HashiCorp products can be made available to a much larger audience, enabling us to serve many more users and customers.<p>I'm really wondering who is kidding who here. Is it IBM or Hashi?
Well folks are already migrating from Terraform to OpenTofu. I am sure similar open source projects for other HashiCorp's products unencumbered with IBM business model will be out pretty soon.<p>So all in all I think another big win for open source even if little indirectly.
It's really sad to me that Hashicorp never found a monetization model that worked.<p>100% of the companies I worked for over the last 6 years all used Terraform, there really wasn't anything else out there, and though there were complaints, it generally worked.<p>It really provided a lot of value to us, and we definitely would have been willing to pay.<p>Though every time we asked, we wanted commitment to update the AWS/GCP providers in a timely fashion for new features, and they would never commit and tried to shove some hosted terraform service down our throats, which we would never agree to anyway due to IP/security concerns.
I wonder how this will work with Red Hat. Traditionally, Red Hat and HashiCorp competed more directly than other IBM portfolio products, fighting over the same customer dollars.
IBM will gut everything to the bone and send most of the jobs to India.<p>There will be nothing worth of using pretty soon as we will all move to the next big foss thing.
funny how these things are sometimes.<p>technically, couldn't have IBM have hired Mitch when he was still doing vagrant ?<p>and put him in a closet somewhere. Given how Mitch, cranks out products -- could technically been cheaper than 6.4bn but then again IBM ain't hurting for cash.
Here's hoping they don't run great tools like Consul and Nomad into the ground somehow. If I'm ever forced to ditch Nomad and work with a pile of strung-together components like k8s I might just quit tech altogether.
I wonder if this may mean we will see the Terraform dogmatic approach to declining to implement much requested functionality in the name of "it doesn't fit our ideals" go by the wayside. I hope so, otherwise, OpenTofu here I come; or well, I'm sure someone's got a ML infra tool in the works by now.<p>I always have mixed feelings when a software company like this grabs their bag and leaves the community that helped build them, high and dry; good for them but still bad for everyone else nine out of ten times.
So long, and thanks for all the time we spend maintaining and fixing our Terraform code rather than just deploying an instance manually once. (It's been great for my job security!)
If this accelerates migration away from Terraform towards a standard, open, IaC platform, then it's a good thing. Something like the JSON version of Terraform that can be generated by different tools, but an open standard instead.<p>Be "interesting" to see what happens to the recently-renamed Terraform Cloud (now Hashicorp Cloud Platform Terraform :eyeroll:)<p>Edited to add: I'm guessing the feature I want added to the terraform language server is never going to happen now. Terraform's language server doesn't support registries inside Terraform Cloud, it doesn't know how to read the token in your terraformrc. bleh.
Some more discussion yesterday ahead of the deal: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303</a>
Not unexpected, I saw a comment a ways back when they started with the BSL stuff that it had nothing to do with terraform, but was a response to IBM selling Vault.
Good for them.<p>Also, it's probably the time to archive my Vagrant Machines repository. I guess all HashiCorp tools will be rolling downhill for personal use.
IBM is trying to increase its "AI revenue" through acquisitions, a standard MBA playbook move (although analysts see through this and often ask specifically for "organic" revenue instead to tease that apart from revenue via acquisitions).<p>In the past, IBM was a technology leader, and probably still has substantial talent excellent inhouse, but from what I'm hearing it has become less appreciative of its researchers and engineers: for instance, my IBM friends lost any patenting activity related bonuses already several years ago.<p>Also, the Watson debacle (trying to monetize the Watson brand and the (impressive) Watson Jeopardy challenge results by quickly acquiring a bunch of stuff, only to then sell it as "our Watson AI technology") didn't help bolster its reputation, but rather harmed it further.<p>Companies like IBM and HP should go back to the roots, value science and engineering, take on bold blue-sky projects (don't leave those only to Musk!), and lead by example. Perhaps this could happen, but only with an engineer-scientist at the top instead of professional managers or bean counters (I'm not attacking the perormance of any individual here as I have not been following recent leadership activities of either company recently).<p>It is unlikely, IMHO, that an acquired company can change the culture of the acquirer. The only time I've seen this happening was Nokia benefitting Microsoft's culture, but that's because they made Nokia's CEO Microsoft's CEO, which is not going to happen with any likelihood in IBM's case.
The copy could not be more IBM: <a href="https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-joins-ibm" rel="nofollow">https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-joins-ibm</a><p>Accelerate! Multi-cloud! Automation!
Question: Is the tldr of companies like these that they sell enterprise server software? And often own the hardware too (data centers)? And then sell a bunch of consulting services on top of that to Fortune 500s and governments?
It's tempting to think "How are these guys even relevant anymore?" but IBM's making $60B+ a year with over $10B cash on hand, apparently from mostly "consulting services".<p>For a lot of developers including me, I never think about IBM or HashiCorp (or Oracle, SAP, etc.) and it's hard to imagine why someone would want to use their software compared to something newer, friendlier, cheaper, and probably faster. Is it just relationships?<p>Just curious how customers are actually getting value from an IBM or a HashiCorp or an Oracle.
Once again, thank you 'mitchellh for Vagrant, I'm sure you have heard this many times before but it really changed the way we worked for the better in every way.
That's alright. HashiCorp stuff was 2nd tier compared to any offerings from the cloud providers themselves just because those providers' own solutions would get preference (obviously!). And cloud is the environment for 95% of app development these days.<p>If HashiCorp stuff is destined to die, something else will eventually rise to fill its niche if it's still valuable.<p>You can always count on technology to churn for no good reason.<p>To avoid sounding completely pessimestic: don't discount an IBM comeback either, for the same churning reasons.