13 ms·

IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

488 points by ahurmazda 2y ago

bdelmas 2y ago
Kinda off topic. How is Red Hat doing after being acquired? (Serious question)
ep103 2y ago
[flagged]
tinyhouse 2y ago
Investors at IPO lost quite a bit of money...
- danw1979 2y ago
  Yeap we did. I wrote it off around the time of the licence change, just after they decided to ditch the TF Team plan in favour of the utterly ridiculous “Resources Under Management” billing model. I knew the company had lost the plot at that point.
  - jeeyoungk 2y ago
    Who's the target audience for this pricing that can afford this? The RUM pricing is indeed quite ridiculous. It feels quite ridiculous, especially if you are managing "soft" resources like IAM roles via Terraform / Pulumi. At least with real resources (say, RDS instances), one can argue that Terraform / Pulumi pricing is a small percentage of the cloud bill. But IAM roles are not charged for in cloud, and there are so many of them (especially if you use IaaC to create very elaborate scheme).
    - Schnitz 2y ago
      Pulumi’s RUM pricing is why I was very hesitant to even evaluate it as an alternative to just using terraform.
      - Aeolun 2y ago
        I’m finding that the basic backend functionality of Pulumi and Terraform managed cloud is fairly easy to build (especially Terraform, I can’t quite believe how absurdly simple their cloud is…)
        hiatus 2y ago
        Plus there are open source projects like Atlantis that fit the bill for many teams with regards to terraform automation.
        sausagefeet 2y ago
        Terrateam too[0] Although Terrateam is more tightly integrated with a VCS provider. Disclaimer: I co-founded Terrateam. [0]https://github.com/terrateamio/terrateam https://github.com/terrateamio/terrateam
    - progbits 2y ago
      It also creates horrible incentives. Oh I won't run this in isolated project or under a separate service account since that costs more, let's just pile everything together.
      - ryanisnan 2y ago
        To be fair to RUM pricing, there are also horrible incentives for workflow invocation based pricing models, or workspace count models.
    - brudgers 2y ago
      Who's the target audience for this pricing that can afford this? The kind of customers it is good to have. Because filtering out price sensitive customers is a sound business strategy. As a rule of thumb, solve any problem your customer might have. Except not having money.
      - bastawhiz 2y ago
        Good for who? Good for people getting bonuses? Good for executives? It doesn't seem to be good for the customers or the people using the software or the people contributing to the open source code. It also doesn't seem to have been good for the investors, looking at the other comments.
        hiatus 2y ago
        Good for people who got in pre-IPO. Bad for people who got in post-IPO.
      - tiniestcabbage 2y ago
        There is an argument to be made that price-sensitive customers are a neglected market. Granted, marketing to them is very different - they're prone to being scooped if someone comes by willing to sell your same product to them at a loss (hi, Amazon and Walmart) - but there are a lot more of them and you're not fighting every startup on the planet for the same handful of clients. Business have made a killing in China and India for a reason, after all.
        brudgers 2y ago
        + There’s an argument against every rule of thumb. + For what it is worth, the just-one-percent-of-all-Chinese is historically a poor business strategy. + As you point out, targeting price sensitive customers puts you in competition with Walmart and Amazon. Not only that but you are competing for their worst customers. you're not fighting every startup on the planet for the same handful of clients Not having access to good clients/customers suggests the business idea might not be viable. Chasing money from people without the wherewithal or will to pay, does not make your business idea viable. But again it is a rule of thumb.
    - thedougd 2y ago
      That must explain why they broke up the S3 resources into a bunch of tiny resources.
  - eikenberry 2y ago
    It was made apparent right after the IPO. Our team got a new VP in charge who changed the mantra from practitioner-first to enterprise-first. Soon after they then laid-off anyone not working on enterprise features. It was a sad death of a great company culture. Mitchell left around the same time which, IMO, speaks volumes.
    - ethbr1 2y ago
      The older I get, the more I'm convinced that practitioner-first is the only reasonable way to drive a product's features, while enterprise-first is the only reasonable way to drive a company's revenue. Which is to say strong sustainable products need both. ... but ffs don't let the entire company use enterprise as a reason to ignore practitioner feature requests.
  - JojoFatsani 2y ago
    Pricing, and, generally speaking, customer engagement were not their strength
  - sepositus 2y ago
    This is probably inaccurate, but it seemed like they wrote it off as a safe move, with their main competitor, Pulumi, getting away with it. However, to play devil's advocate, the number of Terraform resources is a (slightly weak) predictor for resource consumption. Every resource necessitates API calls that consume compute resources. So, if you're offering a "cloud" service that executes Terraform, it's probably a decent way to scale costs appropriately. I hate it, though. It's user-hostile and forces people to adopt anti-patterns to limit costs.
    - hiatus 2y ago
      > However, to play devil's advocate, the number of Terraform resources is a (slightly weak) predictor for resource consumption. Every resource necessitates API calls that consume compute resources. So, if you're offering a "cloud" service that executes Terraform, it's probably a decent way to scale costs appropriately. That would make sense if you paid per API call to any of the cloud providers.
      - sepositus 2y ago
        What happens when you run `terraform apply`? Arguably, a lot of things, but at its core it: - Computes a list of resources and their expected state (where computation is generally proportional to the number of resources). - Synchronizes the remote state by looking up each of these resources (where network ingress/egress is proportional to the number of resources). - Compares the expected state to the remote state (again, where computation is generally proportional to the number of resources). - Executes API calls to make the remote state match the expected state (again, where network ingress/egress is proportional to the number of resources). - Stores the new state (where space is most certainly proportional to the number of resources) This is a bit simplified, but my point is that in each of the five operations, the number of resources can be used as a predictor for the consumed compute resources (network/cpu/memory/disk). A customer with 10k resources is necessarily going to consume more compute resources than one with 10 resources.
        hiatus 2y ago
  - mnahkies 2y ago
    I actually prefer the RUM model. The previous "per apply" based model penalized early stage companies when your infrastructure is rapidly evolving, and discouraged splitting state into smaller workspaces/making smaller iterative changes. Charging by RUM more closely aligns the pricing to the scale/complexity of the infrastructure being managed which makes more sense to me. That said it has tempted me to move management of more resources into kubernetes (via cross plane/config connector)
    - danw1979 2y ago
      The previous model I was referring to was a flat-rate TF Cloud team plan at (in the UK) <$30/month. There were runtime limits IIRC but there was nothing stopping Hashicorp offering a “per user” fixed rate plan at several hundred dollars per month to enterprises for the same service. The various clients I’ve worked for who used TF would have lapped this up. RUM (or the equally opaque “call us” - we won’t answer! - enterprise pricing that proceeded it) not so much.
- daveguy 2y ago
  I'm surprised the deal was worth more than the market cap when they did the license rug pull.
  - toomuchtodo 2y ago
    Broadcom VMware play. If you’re invested as an enterprise in the ecosystem, is going to be a while before you can extricate yourself. In the meantime, you must pay up.
    - nailer 2y ago
      That's true, but it's easier to switch from Terraform to Pulumi than it is to move from VMware to some other virtualization platform.
      - ferminaut 2y ago
        secrets, too. Org's already knee deep in vault / vault-agent for PKI and secrets wont be eager to switch.
        acedTrex 2y ago
        But vault was already a pretty enterprise offering. I'd imagine most people running it had an existing contract.
    - burnte 2y ago
      I'm pretty good at engineering fast moves. I took a company off of Salesforce in 45 days. VMware servers are even easier to changeout. Never done Terraform though.
      - JohnMakin 2y ago
        terraform is OSS, unless you're using the hosted HCP version (workspaces? I think they're called), which, I've been using terraform heavily and at scale since v0.7 and I have never once thought I needed or would pay for something like that.
- yellow_lead 2y ago
  Had to check the numbers. IPO at $80 and sold to IBM for $35. Not great for investors, but insiders benefitted a lot!
  - redeux 2y ago
    Depends how you define insider. Employees were subject to a 6 month lockup and during that time the price dropped dramatically, but they still had to pay taxes on the $80 IPO price. Execs and institutional investors that were able to sell at IPO made out quite well though.
    - guelo 2y ago
      Execs are employees, were they really exempt from the lockout? Seems unethical.
      - Ancalagon 2y ago
        thats preferred stock baby. Startups still a scam to work for.
      - bolognafairy 2y ago
        There are always haves and have-nots, lol. “Tech” isn’t exempted.
      - nemo44x 2y ago
        Nearly certainly they were not. Any stock holder would be blacked out including existing investors.
        redeux 2y ago
        That’s simply not true. You can look at the SEC filings and see exactly who was able to liquidate during the IPO. I’m not passing judgment as to whether that’s “good” or “bad.” It simply is.
    - AcerbicZero 2y ago
- asadm 2y ago
  Yup. My worst investment. Never invest at IPO I guess.
  - rufus_foreman 2y ago
    If that's your worst investment, you're doing great. I bought stock in HashiCorp. I also bought stock in EBET, for a return of -100.00%.
- kccqzy 2y ago
  Yup that's me. Happy user of terraform at that time so bought their stock on the day of IPO.
  - Gee101 2y ago
    Where you paying Terraform for anything at the time? My doubt in the value of the company was that I've been using Terraform for years in Enterprise settings and never needed to pay the company for anything.
    - pizzafeelsright 2y ago
      Totally worthless. Running a few products. Quoted $1MM or so over 3 years for support. I was able to say no and saved six figures each month.
- xyst 2y ago
  *retail investors Retail will always be holding the bag. This is known.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Eh. Lots of retail investors do well with the right stock. Lot's of Apple investors have done well over the years. Microsoft even with the right timing. They didn't with HashiCorp certainly. Bought some but not too much and were part of a housecleaning a few years back (which I'm glad I did).
    - hiatus 2y ago
      How far away from IPO are Apple and Microsoft now? I think parent is lamenting the state of IPOs as cashing out, if anything.
- intelVISA 2y ago
  It's been a zombie for a while...
- neom 2y ago
  Worst investment I ever made. I like Mitchell and Armon so I emotionally just bought the IPO and closed my eyes presuming a TWLO or NET. Oh well!! :)
- febyewary 2y ago
  [flagged]
jmclnx 2y ago
Sorry HashiCorp, been there and got the Tee-shirt (pink) :) Actually for me, the company I was at that IBM purchased was on the verge of folding, so in that case, IBM saved our jobs and I was there for many years.
- hashicorporal 2y ago
  We experienced arbitrary layoffs in 2023, followed by an ominous feeling that more layoffs were imminent. However, the announcement of a deal changed the situation. Now, we are actively hiring for numerous positions. Personally, I am not planning to stay much longer. I had hoped that our corp structure would be similar to RedHat, but it seems that they intend to fully integrate us into the IBM mothership.
  - NetOpWibby 2y ago
    I really wanted to work at HashiCorp in 2017/2018 and did five interviews in one day only to get ghosted[1]. That experience soured me on HC and its tools but I still admired them from afar. End of an era. --- [1]: https://blog.webb.page/2018-01-11-why-the-job-search-sucks.txt https://blog.webb.page/2018-01-11-why-the-job-search-sucks.t...
    - atkailash 2y ago
      [dead]
    - scrapcode 2y ago
      What do you expect is the reason this happens? I would suspect your skill assessment after a handful of interviews is sound and most people liked you. Do you think you just run into a person eventually that doesn't vibe?
      - fn-mote 2y ago
        I read this as the GHOSTING is the thing that bother them. After a full day of interviews, it sounds like. The failure to be hired doesn't sound like it bothers them to me.
jcgrillo 2y ago
> By 2028, it is projected that generative AI will lead to the creation of 1 billion new cloud-native applications. lmfao what the fuck? The source they reference: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US51953724 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US51953724 These clowns want $2500 goddamned american dollars for the privilege of reading their bloviations on this topic, which i absolutely will not pay. You know it's bad when the only people making money on this crap are management consultants. Thinking back to 2014 using vagrant to develop services locally on my laptop I never would have imagined them getting swallowed up by big blue as some bizarre "AI" play. Shit is getting real weird around here.
- yellow_lead 2y ago
  Every time ChatGPT outputs a Dockerfile, it counts as a cloud native application, right? :)
  - darkandbrooding 2y ago
    Did you intend to reference "It's a wonderful life?" When I read your comment I imagine a tiny child in Jimmy Stewart's arms, exclaiming the joys of capitalism ;-)
    - yellow_lead 2y ago
      No but that's a funny coincidence :)
- lotharcable2 2y ago
  This sort of thing is why nobody gives a shit about IBM anymore and they have to keep just buying relevant companies to stay relevant. Hopefully they do the right thing and hand hashicorp over to Redhat so they can open source the shit out of it. So they can do things like make OpenTofu the proper upstream for it, etc.
- jaennaet 2y ago
  Who the heck is IDC's customer base, exactly? $2,500 for that, or $7,500 for this one about – drumroll, please – feature flags! "Modern digital businesses need to be able to adapt to changing end-user demand, and since feature flags decouple release from deployment, it provides a good solution for improving software development velocity and business agility," said Jim Mercer, program vice president of IDC Software Development DevOps and DevSecOps. "Further, feature flags can help derisk releases, enable product experimentation, and allow for targeting and personalizing end-user experiences." https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US52763824 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US52763824
dimgl 2y ago
Is this even the same company that created Terraform? HashiCorp's trajectory has been baffling...
- subpixel 2y ago
  Ansible + Terriform synergized become Terrible.
  - mdaniel 2y ago
    I chuckled, nice job on the name That said, I think a playbook in HCL would be worlds better than the absolutely staggering amount of nonsense needed to quote Jinja2 out of yaml I would also accept them just moving to the GitHub Actions style of ${{ or ${% which would for sure be less disruptive, and (AIUI) could be even opt-in by just promoting the `#jinja2:variable_start_string:'${{', variable_end_string:'}}'` up into playbook files, not just in .j2 files https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/11/collections/ansible/builtin/template_module.html#:~:text=you%20can%20override%20jinja2%20settings https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/11/collections/ansible/buil...
- febyewary 2y ago
  Turns out, nobody's quite figured out how to successfully charge for free shit, but it's moot when you can just burn venture capital for ten years until you get acquired and chopped for parts.
- anonfordays 2y ago
  One of my friends was in management at HashiCorp and what he told he was there were a series of bad internal promotions to product management and heads of development that tanked the company. At the same time there was a huge problem with leftist activist employees taking the company for hostage, not surprised they got scooped up for pennies on the dollar.
ForHackernews 2y ago
Sad to see this, but I will again shill for HashiCorp's Nomad as a better alternative to Kubernetes.
- sepositus 2y ago
  I agree up to a certain scale. I've managed a large Nomad/Consul setup (multiple clusters, geographically separated), and it was nothing but a nightmare. I believe fly.io had a similar experience.
- film42 2y ago
  Nomad is way easier to self-manage than K8s, but GCP does that for me, with all the compliance boxes checked, for extremely cheap. Every cloud provider is in that boat. Nomad will be more work and more money, be it compute or enterprise fees. I'm sticking with k8s.
  - ericjmorey 2y ago
    The convenience and ease of use isn't worth the increased costs?
    - miningape 2y ago
      Who's to say it doesn't cost more in time and effort?
      - airplaneears 2y ago
        [flagged]
  - airplaneears 2y ago
    [flagged]
- lovehashbrowns 2y ago
  Definitely not better than Kubernetes, but I don't regret working on it and I like it as a simpler alternative to Kubernetes. I remember trying to hire people for it and not a single person ever even heard of it.
bigfatkitten 2y ago
One of those places (like HP, Oracle and Broadcom, and also CA back in the day) where once good companies go to die.
- dralley 2y ago
  As a current Red Hat employee, I can say that they've treated us far better than the likes of Oracle or Broadcom would have.
  - gryfft 2y ago
    Give it time.
    - dralley 2y ago
      It's been almost 6 years
      - gryfft 2y ago
        IBM acquired SoftLayer in 2013 and the bluewashing didn't reach a fever pitch until 2019 or so. Also, the pandemic slowed things down at an already dinosauric company. IBM is over a hundred years old. I have faith that it will get around to entirely ruining Red Hat sooner than later.
- glzone1 2y ago
  Redhat has really delivered for IBM and IBM seems not to have messed it up too bad. Some of this is obvious (linux and mainframes aren't a bad combo). Some of it I'm a bit surprised by (openshift revenue seems strong). Probably already basically returned purchase price in revenue and much more than purchase price in market cap. A noticeable thing is https://www.redhat.com/en https://www.redhat.com/en Most of the these type plays the home page has stacked toolbars / marketing / popups / announcements from the parent company and their branding everywhere (IBM XXX powered by Redhat)... I see very little IBM logo or corporate pop-up policy jank on redhat.com.
AcerbicZero 2y ago
Well, darn.
bravetraveler 2y ago
Condolences, Hashicorp folks. Been there.
commandersaki 2y ago
Enjoy switching to Lotus Notes.
- threeseed 2y ago
  It's called HCL Notes now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes And Hashicorp are experts in HCL so I am sure they will love it.
  - bolognafairy 2y ago
    This is hilarious.
  - alsoforgotmypwd 2y ago
    Now, with 500% more Java and a configuration language that isn't XML. ;)
- inahga 2y ago
  IBM switched off Notes to Microsoft 365, maybe two years ago or so. I only correct you because it's an even bigger indictment of Notes that IBM switched off of it.
- xocnad 2y ago
  Been gone for a couple of years now. Outlook replaced it. Legacy Domino apps still around in various places though.
mfreeman451 2y ago
[dead]
xyst 2y ago
The consolidation of power and IP into just several tech companies is worrying to me. Having the misfortune of working at IBM for just a few months, IBM leadership will give it the RedHat treatment. The dinosaurs at IBM will shelve their IP, and sell it for parts. Maybe Bloodmoar will buy up the rest and squeeze whatever remaining profit from acquisition. If given the chance, just take the exit rather than trying to integrate into IBM.
- dralley 2y ago
  >IBM leadership will give it the RedHat treatment. The dinosaurs at IBM will shelve their IP, and sell it for parts. As someone working at Red Hat since before the acquisition, this does not match my experience of "the Red Hat treatment" even a little bit. I don't doubt that they've handled acquisitions badly in the past but they did a decent job leaving us alone.
  - worthless-trash 2y ago
    Biggest change I've seen is the intranet page now has an option to use IBM's single sign on in addition to RH's single sign on.
    - bonzini 2y ago
      There have been larger changes in areas that the SEC could point their fingers at, to make things more uniform between IBM and Red Hat. Sales also had some changes on both sides. For engineering almost no difference other than switching to Slack.
- delulu 2y ago
  [flagged]
nimish 2y ago
Sad!
ants_everywhere 2y ago
Hashicorp's stuff always struck me as pretty hacky with awkward design decisions. For Terraform (at least a few years ago) a badly reviewed PR could cause catastrophic data loss because resources are deleted without requiring an explicit tombstone. Then they did the license change, which didn't reflect well on them. Now it's being sold to IBM, which is essentially a consulting company trying to pivot to mostly undifferentiated software offerings. So I guess Hashicorp is basically over. I suspect the various forks will be used for a while.
- infraking 2y ago
  Your team should be reviewing Terraform plans before merging any infra changes. I find this to be a very strange criticism and is probably indicative of a poor workflow or CI/CD system if anything.
  - ants_everywhere 2y ago
    It's a design flaw. It should be nearly impossible to delete data accidentally. And it should be possible to roll back state in IIAC. No serious organization with any scale is going to have the only thing standing between them and a production database deletion being two over tired engineers rubber stamping each other's code changes. Bad config pushes to prod do happen and they can cause outages like the 2024 Cloudstrike outage. You don't want a tool that takes a minor (but significant) error and turns it into a catastrophic one because of poorly thought out semantics. It's better to just start with a tool that requires at least two engineers to explicitly sign off on deletion.
    - infraking2 2y ago
      > It's a design flaw. It should be nearly impossible to delete data accidentally. And it should be possible to roll back state in IIAC. Still not envisioning what your expected solution would look like. You check the plan, you asses the actions it will take and you either abandon the plan or apply it. You can't roll back destructive changes in cloud environments that's not possible today for obvious reasons. What IaC does provide is a mechanism to quickly rebuild if you do accidentally wipe out resources. I've worked in environments were our entire fleet was wiped out by AWS (thousands of VMs) and we were able to rebuild in hours because of IaC. > No serious organization with any scale is going to have the only thing standing between them and a production database deletion being two over tired engineers rubber stamping each other's code changes. Most "serious organizations" either have policy as code (Sentinel) or are running Terraform with credentials/roles that have reduced capabilities. > Bad config pushes to prod do happen and they can cause outages like the 2024 Cloudstrike outage. You don't want a tool that takes a minor (but significant) error and turns it into a catastrophic one because of poorly thought out semantics. It's better to just start with a tool that requires at least two engineers to explicitly sign off on deletion. This is a criticism of all software/infrastructure deployments with no guardrails. There's nothing stopping you from having two engineers sign off on a TF plan. You can absolutely build that system on top of whatever pipeline you are running. * Funny you mention databases because that's one of the few AWS resources that can be guarded in TF directly - https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/aws/latest/docs/resources/db_instance#deletion_protection-1 https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/aws/latest...
master_crab 2y ago
Do any Opentofu cloud providers (like spacelift) offer a managed migration tool to their cloud and opentofu from TFE or TFC? (Asking for a friend).
- cube2222 2y ago
  Here you go[0]! Docs are linked in the README, and there’s also a recent blog post about it[1]. In any case, make sure to reach out via the website chat widget / email / demo form, we’re happy to help! The migration from Terraform to OpenTofu is pretty seamless right now, and documented in the OpenTofu docs[2]. [0]: https://github.com/spacelift-io/spacelift-migration-kit https://github.com/spacelift-io/spacelift-migration-kit [1]: https://spacelift.io/blog/how-to-migrate-from-terraform-cloud https://spacelift.io/blog/how-to-migrate-from-terraform-clou... [2]: https://opentofu.org/docs/intro/migration/ https://opentofu.org/docs/intro/migration/ Disclaimer: work at Spacelift
transitivebs 2y ago
"HashiCorp's capabilities drive significant synergies across multiple strategic growth areas for IBM, including Red Hat, watsonx, data security, IT automation and Consulting" this sounds like corporate AI slop
- febyewary 2y ago
  Worst part is that a lot of that slop is actually still human-generated.
iamleppert 2y ago
No wonder Vault is now trying to get me to pay $50 a month to store more than 25 secrets. Enshittifucation has already begun.
nemo44x 2y ago
IBM has been on a shopping spree of garbage companies. Which tools are next?
- gryfft 2y ago
  Atlassian?
  - grumple 2y ago
    Seems too big. Market cap is 1/3 of IBM's.
  - nemo44x 2y ago
    Too big. Maybe redis?
  - meepmorp 2y ago
    on the bright side, it could kill jira
- fred_is_fred 2y ago
  Wordpress!
- pan69 2y ago
  TeamForm, ServiceNow, Workday
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
schmichael 2y ago
I joined HashiCorp in 2016 to work on Nomad and have been on the product ever since. Definitely a lot of feelings today. When I joined HashiCorp was maybe 50 people. Armon Dadgar personally onboarded us one at a time, and showed me how to use the coffee maker (remember to wash your own dishes!). There have been a lot of ups (IPO) and downs (BUSL), but the Nomad team and users have been the best I've ever gotten to work with. I've only ever worked at startups before, but HashiCorp itself left that category when it IPO'd. Each phase is definitely different, but then again I don't want go back to roadmapping on a ridiculously small whiteboard in a terrible sub-leased office and building release binaries on my laptop. That was fun once, but I'm ready for a new phase in my own life. I've heard the horror stories of being acquired by IBM, but I've also heard from people who have reveled in the resources and opportunities. I'm hoping for the best for Nomad, our users, and our team. I'd like to think there's room in the world for multiple schedulers, and if not, it won't be for lack of trying.
- linuxftw 2y ago
  There are no resources and opportunities after being acquired by IBM. I worked for Red Hat when they were acquired. Our former CEO was quickly shown the door. We were making so much profit, almost a $1B in quarterly revenue. I left not long after the acquisition. Not long after I left, they laid off a bunch of staff. No matter what they tell you, your day to day will not improve. For my area, it was mostly business as usual, but a net decrease in comp because IBM's ESPP is trash.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - zzzeek 2y ago
    if you left right after the acquisition how can you even speak to what the experience has been?
    - linuxftw 2y ago
      It was within a year, not like the day after.
matt3210 2y ago
Will terraform still work for GCP and AWS?
- febyewary 2y ago
  [flagged]
- blitq 2y ago
  Well... opentofu will.
tzury 2y ago
People who stayed at IBM because they could not afford going anywhere else. People who worked at companies acquired by IBM and could not afford going anywhere else. A mixture of both will be involved from now on in decision making regarding your platform formation core products.
- martinsnow 2y ago
  What about those who like working at IBM?
krick 2y ago
So, what is the practical TL;DR for everyone who isn't neither an employee nor investor? Hashicorp kinda made a lot of significant stuff, but that stuff is mostly FOSS and the commercial product is very niche. I am kinda surprised IBM even bought it, because it isn't very clear to me, how commercializeable this stuff is. So what does it mean? Will IBM most likely kill some FOSS products? Is this even possible? Were, say, terraform or nomad developed mostly by internal devs, or is there a solid enough community already to keep up with development or simply fork the tool if things go south?
- delulu 2y ago
  tl;dr: charging money for free software is, like, really hard.
  - atonse 2y ago
    To an extent maybe. We were ready to invest in HC tools, but they were so damn brittle once we actually got past the smooth apple-like marketing and actually used them. Plenty of odd, not-well-documented behavior, random crashes, even the clusters required a bunch of manual steps to recover from. A major reason to even have a cluster is the self-healing, something tools like MongoDB did right 10+ years ago. Yet we had to manually edit a peers.json file and do all this garbage half the time when our clusters kept dying. It was infuriating. I kept insisting my devops guy had to be wrong when he told me that was the way it was done. I just couldn't believe that anything in 2021 required manual editing of JSON files when we have a million different self-discovery mechanisms (whether it's cloud metadata, or mDNS, etc). But he was 100% right, much to my disbelief. So we ultimately pulled the plug after months of HC stuff running our QA system, because I just didn't feel comfortable pushing it to production given all the random crashes and behavior issues. And I feel vindicated. I think if their stuff was more solid, I would 100% be happy to pay for it for our use cases. I thought generally that their ideas and levels of abstraction felt "right"
- pm90 2y ago
  IBM probably wants to bundle hashi products as part of their cloud offerings and can milk other cloud providers in licensing fees. All cloud providers support terraform and most current infrastructure is probably configured in HCL.
ripcentos 2y ago
All these redhatters talking like centos isnt dead. Like wtf, the Kool aid must taste good.
- carlwgeorge 2y ago
  You created an alt account with "centos" in the name just to complain about CentOS. Yeah, it's the hatters that are the weird ones here.
vcryan 2y ago
I love it when IBM tries to stay relevant!
esseph 2y ago
I was really hoping this wouldn't happen given one org (IBM) effectively controls both Terraform and Ansible. Salt and Puppet both don't seem in a great place. System Initiative is just AWS still, yeah? Welp.
- danw1979 2y ago
  OpenTofu is doing just fine ! Give it a whirl.
DonHopkins 2y ago
Years before '93-'96 when I worked at Kaleida [1], a joint venture of Apple and IBM, alongside Taligent [2] their AIM Alliance [3] sister company, I laughed at the old joke: Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM? A: IBM. But then the joke was on me when I finally worked for a company owned by Apple and IBM at the same time, and experienced it first hand! I gave Lou Gerstner a DreamScape [4] demo involving an animated disembodied spinning bouncing eyeball, who commented "That's a bit too right-brained for me." I replied "Oh no, I should have used the other eyeball!" Later when Sun was shopping itself around, there were rumors that IBM might buy it, so the joke would still apply to them, but it would have been a more dignified death than Oracle ending up lawnmowering [5] Sun, sigh. Now that Apple's 15 times bigger than IBM, I bet the joke still applies, giving Apple a great reason NOT to merge with IBM. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NytloOy7WM&t=323s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NytloOy7WM&t=323s [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
ChrisArchitect 2y ago
Hashicorp blog post: https://www.hashicorp.com/en/blog/hashicorp-officially-joins-the-ibm-family https://www.hashicorp.com/en/blog/hashicorp-officially-joins...
- westurner 2y ago
  IIRC HashiCorp's first product was Vagrant, which was written in Ruby to wrap the CLI args of VMware and other VM hosts.
zkmon 2y ago
As it happened with the other startups that were acquired by IBM, this too shall pass through the digestion system of the dinosaur and ejected out as a dump. Hashicorp products are showing the signs of a legacy thing already. IBM is the nursing home for these sort of aging stuff. I'm a heavy user of Terraform and Vault products. Both do not belong to this era. Also worked for a startup acquired and dumped by IBM.
- BrandoElFollito 2y ago
  > I'm a heavy user of Terraform and Vault products. Both do not belong to this era. So do you find Terraform and Vault good or bad? (sorry, not a native English speaker and I had problems to transcript the sentence)
- alexjplant 2y ago
  What are the modern equivalents? For Terraform I'd imagine it's Pulumi or OpenTofu but what is it for Vault? Last I checked OpenBao didn't seem to have much juice but it's been a minute since I did so. Or are there unrelated projects in this space that are on the same trajectory as Hashicorp was a decade ago?
  - cyberpunk 2y ago
    Crossplane for TF. Secrets whatever your cloud provider has (Google secrets manager etc).
    - nunez 2y ago
      Lol, respectfully no. Crossplane is excellent but you need to understand CRDs and kubectl at what I'd consider n intermediate level to really grok it whereas Terraform's CLI is almost fool-proof. Relying on cloud key vaults is expensive and locks you in. Vault and Consul can run anywhere, even in your toaster. They also support those same KMS. Also, dead easy TUI and GUI with Vault Enterprise
- alsoforgotmypwd 2y ago
  Them, CA, and Broadcom.
technick 2y ago
It's been good using hashicorp tools, now IBM is going to run them to the ground. I need to look into the fork of tf now.
steveBK123 2y ago
In some ways to me it feels like a turning point for the GFC/ZIRP thru COVID era of tech companies with no path to profit. After the haze of the LLM bubble passes, I hope startups have an exit strategy other than "we'll just get 0.01% of users to pay 6+ figures for support" or "ads". Good tech deserves a good business model such that it can endure for the long term.
sudomateo 2y ago
I learned many things at HashiCorp but none as important as choosing ISOs over RSUs when given the chance. Thank you for the gains $HCP. I met some great people along the way that I'm glad to have gotten the opportunity to work with. Godspeed all!
zoobab 2y ago
IBM is pushing for restauring software patents in the US (and elsewhere), not a friend of software freedom.
HackerThemAll 2y ago
Good bye Terraform :joy:
- alsoforgotmypwd 2y ago
  Opentofu then
hackburg 2y ago
[dead]

488 points by ahurmazda 2y ago

bdelmas 2y ago

Kinda off topic. How is Red Hat doing after being acquired? (Serious question)

ep103 2y ago

[flagged]

tinyhouse 2y ago

Investors at IPO lost quite a bit of money...

danw1979 2y ago
Yeap we did. I wrote it off around the time of the licence change, just after they decided to ditch the TF Team plan in favour of the utterly ridiculous “Resources Under Management” billing model. I knew the company had lost the plot at that point.
- jeeyoungk 2y ago
  Who's the target audience for this pricing that can afford this? The RUM pricing is indeed quite ridiculous. It feels quite ridiculous, especially if you are managing "soft" resources like IAM roles via Terraform / Pulumi. At least with real resources (say, RDS instances), one can argue that Terraform / Pulumi pricing is a small percentage of the cloud bill. But IAM roles are not charged for in cloud, and there are so many of them (especially if you use IaaC to create very elaborate scheme).
  - Schnitz 2y ago
    Pulumi’s RUM pricing is why I was very hesitant to even evaluate it as an alternative to just using terraform.
    - Aeolun 2y ago
      I’m finding that the basic backend functionality of Pulumi and Terraform managed cloud is fairly easy to build (especially Terraform, I can’t quite believe how absurdly simple their cloud is…)
      - hiatus 2y ago
        Plus there are open source projects like Atlantis that fit the bill for many teams with regards to terraform automation.
        sausagefeet 2y ago
        Terrateam too[0] Although Terrateam is more tightly integrated with a VCS provider. Disclaimer: I co-founded Terrateam. [0]https://github.com/terrateamio/terrateam https://github.com/terrateamio/terrateam
  - progbits 2y ago
    It also creates horrible incentives. Oh I won't run this in isolated project or under a separate service account since that costs more, let's just pile everything together.
    - ryanisnan 2y ago
      To be fair to RUM pricing, there are also horrible incentives for workflow invocation based pricing models, or workspace count models.
  - brudgers 2y ago
    Who's the target audience for this pricing that can afford this? The kind of customers it is good to have. Because filtering out price sensitive customers is a sound business strategy. As a rule of thumb, solve any problem your customer might have. Except not having money.
    - bastawhiz 2y ago
      Good for who? Good for people getting bonuses? Good for executives? It doesn't seem to be good for the customers or the people using the software or the people contributing to the open source code. It also doesn't seem to have been good for the investors, looking at the other comments.
      - hiatus 2y ago
        Good for people who got in pre-IPO. Bad for people who got in post-IPO.
    - tiniestcabbage 2y ago
      There is an argument to be made that price-sensitive customers are a neglected market. Granted, marketing to them is very different - they're prone to being scooped if someone comes by willing to sell your same product to them at a loss (hi, Amazon and Walmart) - but there are a lot more of them and you're not fighting every startup on the planet for the same handful of clients. Business have made a killing in China and India for a reason, after all.
      - brudgers 2y ago
        + There’s an argument against every rule of thumb. + For what it is worth, the just-one-percent-of-all-Chinese is historically a poor business strategy. + As you point out, targeting price sensitive customers puts you in competition with Walmart and Amazon. Not only that but you are competing for their worst customers. you're not fighting every startup on the planet for the same handful of clients Not having access to good clients/customers suggests the business idea might not be viable. Chasing money from people without the wherewithal or will to pay, does not make your business idea viable. But again it is a rule of thumb.
  - thedougd 2y ago
    That must explain why they broke up the S3 resources into a bunch of tiny resources.
- eikenberry 2y ago
  It was made apparent right after the IPO. Our team got a new VP in charge who changed the mantra from practitioner-first to enterprise-first. Soon after they then laid-off anyone not working on enterprise features. It was a sad death of a great company culture. Mitchell left around the same time which, IMO, speaks volumes.
  - ethbr1 2y ago
    The older I get, the more I'm convinced that practitioner-first is the only reasonable way to drive a product's features, while enterprise-first is the only reasonable way to drive a company's revenue. Which is to say strong sustainable products need both. ... but ffs don't let the entire company use enterprise as a reason to ignore practitioner feature requests.
- JojoFatsani 2y ago
  Pricing, and, generally speaking, customer engagement were not their strength
- sepositus 2y ago
  This is probably inaccurate, but it seemed like they wrote it off as a safe move, with their main competitor, Pulumi, getting away with it. However, to play devil's advocate, the number of Terraform resources is a (slightly weak) predictor for resource consumption. Every resource necessitates API calls that consume compute resources. So, if you're offering a "cloud" service that executes Terraform, it's probably a decent way to scale costs appropriately. I hate it, though. It's user-hostile and forces people to adopt anti-patterns to limit costs.
  - hiatus 2y ago
    > However, to play devil's advocate, the number of Terraform resources is a (slightly weak) predictor for resource consumption. Every resource necessitates API calls that consume compute resources. So, if you're offering a "cloud" service that executes Terraform, it's probably a decent way to scale costs appropriately. That would make sense if you paid per API call to any of the cloud providers.
    - sepositus 2y ago
      What happens when you run `terraform apply`? Arguably, a lot of things, but at its core it: - Computes a list of resources and their expected state (where computation is generally proportional to the number of resources). - Synchronizes the remote state by looking up each of these resources (where network ingress/egress is proportional to the number of resources). - Compares the expected state to the remote state (again, where computation is generally proportional to the number of resources). - Executes API calls to make the remote state match the expected state (again, where network ingress/egress is proportional to the number of resources). - Stores the new state (where space is most certainly proportional to the number of resources) This is a bit simplified, but my point is that in each of the five operations, the number of resources can be used as a predictor for the consumed compute resources (network/cpu/memory/disk). A customer with 10k resources is necessarily going to consume more compute resources than one with 10 resources.
      - hiatus 2y ago
- mnahkies 2y ago
  I actually prefer the RUM model. The previous "per apply" based model penalized early stage companies when your infrastructure is rapidly evolving, and discouraged splitting state into smaller workspaces/making smaller iterative changes. Charging by RUM more closely aligns the pricing to the scale/complexity of the infrastructure being managed which makes more sense to me. That said it has tempted me to move management of more resources into kubernetes (via cross plane/config connector)
  - danw1979 2y ago
    The previous model I was referring to was a flat-rate TF Cloud team plan at (in the UK) <$30/month. There were runtime limits IIRC but there was nothing stopping Hashicorp offering a “per user” fixed rate plan at several hundred dollars per month to enterprises for the same service. The various clients I’ve worked for who used TF would have lapped this up. RUM (or the equally opaque “call us” - we won’t answer! - enterprise pricing that proceeded it) not so much.
daveguy 2y ago
I'm surprised the deal was worth more than the market cap when they did the license rug pull.
- toomuchtodo 2y ago
  Broadcom VMware play. If you’re invested as an enterprise in the ecosystem, is going to be a while before you can extricate yourself. In the meantime, you must pay up.
  - nailer 2y ago
    That's true, but it's easier to switch from Terraform to Pulumi than it is to move from VMware to some other virtualization platform.
    - ferminaut 2y ago
      secrets, too. Org's already knee deep in vault / vault-agent for PKI and secrets wont be eager to switch.
      - acedTrex 2y ago
        But vault was already a pretty enterprise offering. I'd imagine most people running it had an existing contract.
  - burnte 2y ago
    I'm pretty good at engineering fast moves. I took a company off of Salesforce in 45 days. VMware servers are even easier to changeout. Never done Terraform though.
    - JohnMakin 2y ago
      terraform is OSS, unless you're using the hosted HCP version (workspaces? I think they're called), which, I've been using terraform heavily and at scale since v0.7 and I have never once thought I needed or would pay for something like that.
yellow_lead 2y ago
Had to check the numbers. IPO at $80 and sold to IBM for $35. Not great for investors, but insiders benefitted a lot!
- redeux 2y ago
  Depends how you define insider. Employees were subject to a 6 month lockup and during that time the price dropped dramatically, but they still had to pay taxes on the $80 IPO price. Execs and institutional investors that were able to sell at IPO made out quite well though.
  - guelo 2y ago
    Execs are employees, were they really exempt from the lockout? Seems unethical.
    - Ancalagon 2y ago
      thats preferred stock baby. Startups still a scam to work for.
    - bolognafairy 2y ago
      There are always haves and have-nots, lol. “Tech” isn’t exempted.
    - nemo44x 2y ago
      Nearly certainly they were not. Any stock holder would be blacked out including existing investors.
      - redeux 2y ago
        That’s simply not true. You can look at the SEC filings and see exactly who was able to liquidate during the IPO. I’m not passing judgment as to whether that’s “good” or “bad.” It simply is.
  - AcerbicZero 2y ago
asadm 2y ago
Yup. My worst investment. Never invest at IPO I guess.
- rufus_foreman 2y ago
  If that's your worst investment, you're doing great. I bought stock in HashiCorp. I also bought stock in EBET, for a return of -100.00%.
kccqzy 2y ago
Yup that's me. Happy user of terraform at that time so bought their stock on the day of IPO.
- Gee101 2y ago
  Where you paying Terraform for anything at the time? My doubt in the value of the company was that I've been using Terraform for years in Enterprise settings and never needed to pay the company for anything.
  - pizzafeelsright 2y ago
    Totally worthless. Running a few products. Quoted $1MM or so over 3 years for support. I was able to say no and saved six figures each month.
xyst 2y ago
*retail investors Retail will always be holding the bag. This is known.
- ghaff 2y ago
  Eh. Lots of retail investors do well with the right stock. Lot's of Apple investors have done well over the years. Microsoft even with the right timing. They didn't with HashiCorp certainly. Bought some but not too much and were part of a housecleaning a few years back (which I'm glad I did).
  - hiatus 2y ago
    How far away from IPO are Apple and Microsoft now? I think parent is lamenting the state of IPOs as cashing out, if anything.
intelVISA 2y ago
It's been a zombie for a while...
neom 2y ago
Worst investment I ever made. I like Mitchell and Armon so I emotionally just bought the IPO and closed my eyes presuming a TWLO or NET. Oh well!! :)
febyewary 2y ago
[flagged]

jmclnx 2y ago

Sorry HashiCorp, been there and got the Tee-shirt (pink) :) Actually for me, the company I was at that IBM purchased was on the verge of folding, so in that case, IBM saved our jobs and I was there for many years.

hashicorporal 2y ago
We experienced arbitrary layoffs in 2023, followed by an ominous feeling that more layoffs were imminent. However, the announcement of a deal changed the situation. Now, we are actively hiring for numerous positions. Personally, I am not planning to stay much longer. I had hoped that our corp structure would be similar to RedHat, but it seems that they intend to fully integrate us into the IBM mothership.
- NetOpWibby 2y ago
  I really wanted to work at HashiCorp in 2017/2018 and did five interviews in one day only to get ghosted[1]. That experience soured me on HC and its tools but I still admired them from afar. End of an era. --- [1]: https://blog.webb.page/2018-01-11-why-the-job-search-sucks.txt https://blog.webb.page/2018-01-11-why-the-job-search-sucks.t...
  - atkailash 2y ago
    [dead]
  - scrapcode 2y ago
    What do you expect is the reason this happens? I would suspect your skill assessment after a handful of interviews is sound and most people liked you. Do you think you just run into a person eventually that doesn't vibe?
    - fn-mote 2y ago
      I read this as the GHOSTING is the thing that bother them. After a full day of interviews, it sounds like. The failure to be hired doesn't sound like it bothers them to me.

jcgrillo 2y ago

> By 2028, it is projected that generative AI will lead to the creation of 1 billion new cloud-native applications. lmfao what the fuck? The source they reference: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US51953724 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US51953724 These clowns want $2500 goddamned american dollars for the privilege of reading their bloviations on this topic, which i absolutely will not pay. You know it's bad when the only people making money on this crap are management consultants. Thinking back to 2014 using vagrant to develop services locally on my laptop I never would have imagined them getting swallowed up by big blue as some bizarre "AI" play. Shit is getting real weird around here.

yellow_lead 2y ago
Every time ChatGPT outputs a Dockerfile, it counts as a cloud native application, right? :)
- darkandbrooding 2y ago
  Did you intend to reference "It's a wonderful life?" When I read your comment I imagine a tiny child in Jimmy Stewart's arms, exclaiming the joys of capitalism ;-)
  - yellow_lead 2y ago
    No but that's a funny coincidence :)
lotharcable2 2y ago
This sort of thing is why nobody gives a shit about IBM anymore and they have to keep just buying relevant companies to stay relevant. Hopefully they do the right thing and hand hashicorp over to Redhat so they can open source the shit out of it. So they can do things like make OpenTofu the proper upstream for it, etc.
jaennaet 2y ago
Who the heck is IDC's customer base, exactly? $2,500 for that, or $7,500 for this one about – drumroll, please – feature flags! "Modern digital businesses need to be able to adapt to changing end-user demand, and since feature flags decouple release from deployment, it provides a good solution for improving software development velocity and business agility," said Jim Mercer, program vice president of IDC Software Development DevOps and DevSecOps. "Further, feature flags can help derisk releases, enable product experimentation, and allow for targeting and personalizing end-user experiences." https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US52763824 https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US52763824

dimgl 2y ago

Is this even the same company that created Terraform? HashiCorp's trajectory has been baffling...

subpixel 2y ago
Ansible + Terriform synergized become Terrible.
- mdaniel 2y ago
  I chuckled, nice job on the name That said, I think a playbook in HCL would be worlds better than the absolutely staggering amount of nonsense needed to quote Jinja2 out of yaml I would also accept them just moving to the GitHub Actions style of ${{ or ${% which would for sure be less disruptive, and (AIUI) could be even opt-in by just promoting the `#jinja2:variable_start_string:'${{', variable_end_string:'}}'` up into playbook files, not just in .j2 files https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/11/collections/ansible/builtin/template_module.html#:~:text=you%20can%20override%20jinja2%20settings https://docs.ansible.com/ansible/11/collections/ansible/buil...
febyewary 2y ago
Turns out, nobody's quite figured out how to successfully charge for free shit, but it's moot when you can just burn venture capital for ten years until you get acquired and chopped for parts.
anonfordays 2y ago
One of my friends was in management at HashiCorp and what he told he was there were a series of bad internal promotions to product management and heads of development that tanked the company. At the same time there was a huge problem with leftist activist employees taking the company for hostage, not surprised they got scooped up for pennies on the dollar.

ForHackernews 2y ago

Sad to see this, but I will again shill for HashiCorp's Nomad as a better alternative to Kubernetes.

sepositus 2y ago
I agree up to a certain scale. I've managed a large Nomad/Consul setup (multiple clusters, geographically separated), and it was nothing but a nightmare. I believe fly.io had a similar experience.
film42 2y ago
Nomad is way easier to self-manage than K8s, but GCP does that for me, with all the compliance boxes checked, for extremely cheap. Every cloud provider is in that boat. Nomad will be more work and more money, be it compute or enterprise fees. I'm sticking with k8s.
- ericjmorey 2y ago
  The convenience and ease of use isn't worth the increased costs?
  - miningape 2y ago
    Who's to say it doesn't cost more in time and effort?
    - airplaneears 2y ago
      [flagged]
- airplaneears 2y ago
  [flagged]
lovehashbrowns 2y ago
Definitely not better than Kubernetes, but I don't regret working on it and I like it as a simpler alternative to Kubernetes. I remember trying to hire people for it and not a single person ever even heard of it.

bigfatkitten 2y ago

One of those places (like HP, Oracle and Broadcom, and also CA back in the day) where once good companies go to die.

dralley 2y ago
As a current Red Hat employee, I can say that they've treated us far better than the likes of Oracle or Broadcom would have.
- gryfft 2y ago
  Give it time.
  - dralley 2y ago
    It's been almost 6 years
    - gryfft 2y ago
      IBM acquired SoftLayer in 2013 and the bluewashing didn't reach a fever pitch until 2019 or so. Also, the pandemic slowed things down at an already dinosauric company. IBM is over a hundred years old. I have faith that it will get around to entirely ruining Red Hat sooner than later.
glzone1 2y ago
Redhat has really delivered for IBM and IBM seems not to have messed it up too bad. Some of this is obvious (linux and mainframes aren't a bad combo). Some of it I'm a bit surprised by (openshift revenue seems strong). Probably already basically returned purchase price in revenue and much more than purchase price in market cap. A noticeable thing is https://www.redhat.com/en https://www.redhat.com/en Most of the these type plays the home page has stacked toolbars / marketing / popups / announcements from the parent company and their branding everywhere (IBM XXX powered by Redhat)... I see very little IBM logo or corporate pop-up policy jank on redhat.com.

AcerbicZero 2y ago

Well, darn.

bravetraveler 2y ago

Condolences, Hashicorp folks. Been there.

commandersaki 2y ago

Enjoy switching to Lotus Notes.

threeseed 2y ago
It's called HCL Notes now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes And Hashicorp are experts in HCL so I am sure they will love it.
- bolognafairy 2y ago
  This is hilarious.
- alsoforgotmypwd 2y ago
  Now, with 500% more Java and a configuration language that isn't XML. ;)
inahga 2y ago
IBM switched off Notes to Microsoft 365, maybe two years ago or so. I only correct you because it's an even bigger indictment of Notes that IBM switched off of it.
xocnad 2y ago
Been gone for a couple of years now. Outlook replaced it. Legacy Domino apps still around in various places though.

mfreeman451 2y ago

[dead]

xyst 2y ago

The consolidation of power and IP into just several tech companies is worrying to me. Having the misfortune of working at IBM for just a few months, IBM leadership will give it the RedHat treatment. The dinosaurs at IBM will shelve their IP, and sell it for parts. Maybe Bloodmoar will buy up the rest and squeeze whatever remaining profit from acquisition. If given the chance, just take the exit rather than trying to integrate into IBM.

dralley 2y ago
>IBM leadership will give it the RedHat treatment. The dinosaurs at IBM will shelve their IP, and sell it for parts. As someone working at Red Hat since before the acquisition, this does not match my experience of "the Red Hat treatment" even a little bit. I don't doubt that they've handled acquisitions badly in the past but they did a decent job leaving us alone.
- worthless-trash 2y ago
  Biggest change I've seen is the intranet page now has an option to use IBM's single sign on in addition to RH's single sign on.
  - bonzini 2y ago
    There have been larger changes in areas that the SEC could point their fingers at, to make things more uniform between IBM and Red Hat. Sales also had some changes on both sides. For engineering almost no difference other than switching to Slack.
delulu 2y ago
[flagged]

nimish 2y ago

Sad!

ants_everywhere 2y ago

Hashicorp's stuff always struck me as pretty hacky with awkward design decisions. For Terraform (at least a few years ago) a badly reviewed PR could cause catastrophic data loss because resources are deleted without requiring an explicit tombstone. Then they did the license change, which didn't reflect well on them. Now it's being sold to IBM, which is essentially a consulting company trying to pivot to mostly undifferentiated software offerings. So I guess Hashicorp is basically over. I suspect the various forks will be used for a while.

infraking 2y ago
Your team should be reviewing Terraform plans before merging any infra changes. I find this to be a very strange criticism and is probably indicative of a poor workflow or CI/CD system if anything.
- ants_everywhere 2y ago
  It's a design flaw. It should be nearly impossible to delete data accidentally. And it should be possible to roll back state in IIAC. No serious organization with any scale is going to have the only thing standing between them and a production database deletion being two over tired engineers rubber stamping each other's code changes. Bad config pushes to prod do happen and they can cause outages like the 2024 Cloudstrike outage. You don't want a tool that takes a minor (but significant) error and turns it into a catastrophic one because of poorly thought out semantics. It's better to just start with a tool that requires at least two engineers to explicitly sign off on deletion.
  - infraking2 2y ago
    > It's a design flaw. It should be nearly impossible to delete data accidentally. And it should be possible to roll back state in IIAC. Still not envisioning what your expected solution would look like. You check the plan, you asses the actions it will take and you either abandon the plan or apply it. You can't roll back destructive changes in cloud environments that's not possible today for obvious reasons. What IaC does provide is a mechanism to quickly rebuild if you do accidentally wipe out resources. I've worked in environments were our entire fleet was wiped out by AWS (thousands of VMs) and we were able to rebuild in hours because of IaC. > No serious organization with any scale is going to have the only thing standing between them and a production database deletion being two over tired engineers rubber stamping each other's code changes. Most "serious organizations" either have policy as code (Sentinel) or are running Terraform with credentials/roles that have reduced capabilities. > Bad config pushes to prod do happen and they can cause outages like the 2024 Cloudstrike outage. You don't want a tool that takes a minor (but significant) error and turns it into a catastrophic one because of poorly thought out semantics. It's better to just start with a tool that requires at least two engineers to explicitly sign off on deletion. This is a criticism of all software/infrastructure deployments with no guardrails. There's nothing stopping you from having two engineers sign off on a TF plan. You can absolutely build that system on top of whatever pipeline you are running. * Funny you mention databases because that's one of the few AWS resources that can be guarded in TF directly - https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/aws/latest/docs/resources/db_instance#deletion_protection-1 https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/aws/latest...

master_crab 2y ago

Do any Opentofu cloud providers (like spacelift) offer a managed migration tool to their cloud and opentofu from TFE or TFC? (Asking for a friend).

cube2222 2y ago
Here you go[0]! Docs are linked in the README, and there’s also a recent blog post about it[1]. In any case, make sure to reach out via the website chat widget / email / demo form, we’re happy to help! The migration from Terraform to OpenTofu is pretty seamless right now, and documented in the OpenTofu docs[2]. [0]: https://github.com/spacelift-io/spacelift-migration-kit https://github.com/spacelift-io/spacelift-migration-kit [1]: https://spacelift.io/blog/how-to-migrate-from-terraform-cloud https://spacelift.io/blog/how-to-migrate-from-terraform-clou... [2]: https://opentofu.org/docs/intro/migration/ https://opentofu.org/docs/intro/migration/ Disclaimer: work at Spacelift

transitivebs 2y ago

"HashiCorp's capabilities drive significant synergies across multiple strategic growth areas for IBM, including Red Hat, watsonx, data security, IT automation and Consulting" this sounds like corporate AI slop

febyewary 2y ago
Worst part is that a lot of that slop is actually still human-generated.

iamleppert 2y ago

No wonder Vault is now trying to get me to pay $50 a month to store more than 25 secrets. Enshittifucation has already begun.

nemo44x 2y ago

IBM has been on a shopping spree of garbage companies. Which tools are next?

gryfft 2y ago
Atlassian?
- grumple 2y ago
  Seems too big. Market cap is 1/3 of IBM's.
- nemo44x 2y ago
  Too big. Maybe redis?
- meepmorp 2y ago
  on the bright side, it could kill jira
fred_is_fred 2y ago
Wordpress!
pan69 2y ago
TeamForm, ServiceNow, Workday

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

schmichael 2y ago

I joined HashiCorp in 2016 to work on Nomad and have been on the product ever since. Definitely a lot of feelings today. When I joined HashiCorp was maybe 50 people. Armon Dadgar personally onboarded us one at a time, and showed me how to use the coffee maker (remember to wash your own dishes!). There have been a lot of ups (IPO) and downs (BUSL), but the Nomad team and users have been the best I've ever gotten to work with. I've only ever worked at startups before, but HashiCorp itself left that category when it IPO'd. Each phase is definitely different, but then again I don't want go back to roadmapping on a ridiculously small whiteboard in a terrible sub-leased office and building release binaries on my laptop. That was fun once, but I'm ready for a new phase in my own life. I've heard the horror stories of being acquired by IBM, but I've also heard from people who have reveled in the resources and opportunities. I'm hoping for the best for Nomad, our users, and our team. I'd like to think there's room in the world for multiple schedulers, and if not, it won't be for lack of trying.

linuxftw 2y ago
There are no resources and opportunities after being acquired by IBM. I worked for Red Hat when they were acquired. Our former CEO was quickly shown the door. We were making so much profit, almost a $1B in quarterly revenue. I left not long after the acquisition. Not long after I left, they laid off a bunch of staff. No matter what they tell you, your day to day will not improve. For my area, it was mostly business as usual, but a net decrease in comp because IBM's ESPP is trash.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- zzzeek 2y ago
  if you left right after the acquisition how can you even speak to what the experience has been?
  - linuxftw 2y ago
    It was within a year, not like the day after.

matt3210 2y ago

Will terraform still work for GCP and AWS?

febyewary 2y ago
[flagged]
blitq 2y ago
Well... opentofu will.

tzury 2y ago

People who stayed at IBM because they could not afford going anywhere else. People who worked at companies acquired by IBM and could not afford going anywhere else. A mixture of both will be involved from now on in decision making regarding your platform formation core products.

martinsnow 2y ago
What about those who like working at IBM?

krick 2y ago

So, what is the practical TL;DR for everyone who isn't neither an employee nor investor? Hashicorp kinda made a lot of significant stuff, but that stuff is mostly FOSS and the commercial product is very niche. I am kinda surprised IBM even bought it, because it isn't very clear to me, how commercializeable this stuff is. So what does it mean? Will IBM most likely kill some FOSS products? Is this even possible? Were, say, terraform or nomad developed mostly by internal devs, or is there a solid enough community already to keep up with development or simply fork the tool if things go south?

delulu 2y ago
tl;dr: charging money for free software is, like, really hard.
- atonse 2y ago
  To an extent maybe. We were ready to invest in HC tools, but they were so damn brittle once we actually got past the smooth apple-like marketing and actually used them. Plenty of odd, not-well-documented behavior, random crashes, even the clusters required a bunch of manual steps to recover from. A major reason to even have a cluster is the self-healing, something tools like MongoDB did right 10+ years ago. Yet we had to manually edit a peers.json file and do all this garbage half the time when our clusters kept dying. It was infuriating. I kept insisting my devops guy had to be wrong when he told me that was the way it was done. I just couldn't believe that anything in 2021 required manual editing of JSON files when we have a million different self-discovery mechanisms (whether it's cloud metadata, or mDNS, etc). But he was 100% right, much to my disbelief. So we ultimately pulled the plug after months of HC stuff running our QA system, because I just didn't feel comfortable pushing it to production given all the random crashes and behavior issues. And I feel vindicated. I think if their stuff was more solid, I would 100% be happy to pay for it for our use cases. I thought generally that their ideas and levels of abstraction felt "right"
pm90 2y ago
IBM probably wants to bundle hashi products as part of their cloud offerings and can milk other cloud providers in licensing fees. All cloud providers support terraform and most current infrastructure is probably configured in HCL.

ripcentos 2y ago

All these redhatters talking like centos isnt dead. Like wtf, the Kool aid must taste good.

carlwgeorge 2y ago
You created an alt account with "centos" in the name just to complain about CentOS. Yeah, it's the hatters that are the weird ones here.

vcryan 2y ago

I love it when IBM tries to stay relevant!

esseph 2y ago

I was really hoping this wouldn't happen given one org (IBM) effectively controls both Terraform and Ansible. Salt and Puppet both don't seem in a great place. System Initiative is just AWS still, yeah? Welp.

danw1979 2y ago
OpenTofu is doing just fine ! Give it a whirl.

DonHopkins 2y ago

Years before '93-'96 when I worked at Kaleida [1], a joint venture of Apple and IBM, alongside Taligent [2] their AIM Alliance [3] sister company, I laughed at the old joke: Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM? A: IBM. But then the joke was on me when I finally worked for a company owned by Apple and IBM at the same time, and experienced it first hand! I gave Lou Gerstner a DreamScape [4] demo involving an animated disembodied spinning bouncing eyeball, who commented "That's a bit too right-brained for me." I replied "Oh no, I should have used the other eyeball!" Later when Sun was shopping itself around, there were rumors that IBM might buy it, so the joke would still apply to them, but it would have been a more dignified death than Oracle ending up lawnmowering [5] Sun, sigh. Now that Apple's 15 times bigger than IBM, I bet the joke still applies, giving Apple a great reason NOT to merge with IBM. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance [4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NytloOy7WM&t=323s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NytloOy7WM&t=323s [5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246

ChrisArchitect 2y ago

Hashicorp blog post: https://www.hashicorp.com/en/blog/hashicorp-officially-joins-the-ibm-family https://www.hashicorp.com/en/blog/hashicorp-officially-joins...

westurner 2y ago
IIRC HashiCorp's first product was Vagrant, which was written in Ruby to wrap the CLI args of VMware and other VM hosts.

zkmon 2y ago

As it happened with the other startups that were acquired by IBM, this too shall pass through the digestion system of the dinosaur and ejected out as a dump. Hashicorp products are showing the signs of a legacy thing already. IBM is the nursing home for these sort of aging stuff. I'm a heavy user of Terraform and Vault products. Both do not belong to this era. Also worked for a startup acquired and dumped by IBM.

BrandoElFollito 2y ago
> I'm a heavy user of Terraform and Vault products. Both do not belong to this era. So do you find Terraform and Vault good or bad? (sorry, not a native English speaker and I had problems to transcript the sentence)
alexjplant 2y ago
What are the modern equivalents? For Terraform I'd imagine it's Pulumi or OpenTofu but what is it for Vault? Last I checked OpenBao didn't seem to have much juice but it's been a minute since I did so. Or are there unrelated projects in this space that are on the same trajectory as Hashicorp was a decade ago?
- cyberpunk 2y ago
  Crossplane for TF. Secrets whatever your cloud provider has (Google secrets manager etc).
  - nunez 2y ago
    Lol, respectfully no. Crossplane is excellent but you need to understand CRDs and kubectl at what I'd consider n intermediate level to really grok it whereas Terraform's CLI is almost fool-proof. Relying on cloud key vaults is expensive and locks you in. Vault and Consul can run anywhere, even in your toaster. They also support those same KMS. Also, dead easy TUI and GUI with Vault Enterprise
alsoforgotmypwd 2y ago
Them, CA, and Broadcom.

technick 2y ago

It's been good using hashicorp tools, now IBM is going to run them to the ground. I need to look into the fork of tf now.

steveBK123 2y ago

In some ways to me it feels like a turning point for the GFC/ZIRP thru COVID era of tech companies with no path to profit. After the haze of the LLM bubble passes, I hope startups have an exit strategy other than "we'll just get 0.01% of users to pay 6+ figures for support" or "ads". Good tech deserves a good business model such that it can endure for the long term.

sudomateo 2y ago

I learned many things at HashiCorp but none as important as choosing ISOs over RSUs when given the chance. Thank you for the gains $HCP. I met some great people along the way that I'm glad to have gotten the opportunity to work with. Godspeed all!

zoobab 2y ago

IBM is pushing for restauring software patents in the US (and elsewhere), not a friend of software freedom.

HackerThemAll 2y ago

Good bye Terraform :joy:

alsoforgotmypwd 2y ago
Opentofu then

hackburg 2y ago

[dead]