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My viewpoint is based on the products they're competing against: - Their OSS offerings - Other OSS offerings like Istio, Ansible, Conjour, and Kubernetes - H

My viewpoint is based on the products they're competing against: - Their OSS offerings - Other OSS offerings like Istio, Ansible, Conjour, and Kubernetes - Hybrid cloud solutions like Outpost and Anthos Additionally, I think HashiCorp not embracing kubernetes and trying to push Nomad was a huge miscalculation. None of their products have particularly noteworthy integrations with it, with the community picking up the slack (almost like internally they don't care).

toomuchtodo 7y ago
As soon as you're working with more than a few people at a time, or in an environment that has compliance, governance, or auditing requirements, you're moving up to Terraform Enterprise (either SaaS or on-prem). I admit you can get pretty far on their OSS offerings, but most folks who need the enterprise features are going to pay for them (SAML/SSO, audit log emissions, private datacenter/on-prem installs, etc). Small shops, startups, and the like? Probably not, but they don't have that much cash anyway; the benefit of marketing to them is a) if they do get big, you're already in the door to sell to them or b) they don't get big, but they grow the ecosystem with engineers knowing and using the products. Those engineers might either end up working for Hashicorp, or landing a gig at a job where they can evangelize the tools and advocate paying for them. Very similar to GitHub's model, and I'd argue it works for everyone; people who can pay, do, people who can't or won't still get value they otherwise wouldn't. IMHO, configuration management compliments Packer and Terraform, it doesn't compete against it (based on my experience using Ansible and Packer for VMs of all sorts). Kubernetes is a beast in itself; the firms who implement Nomad are not the same as those who would go all in on k8s. Personally, I think Kubernetes is overly complex and prefer Nomad as a scheduler, YMMV (my jobs are more batch in nature, less services).
purpleidea 7y ago
> Additionally, I think HashiCorp not embracing kubernetes and trying to push Nomad was a huge miscalculation. Nah, embracing kubernetes is the miscalculation that every other company is making. It's a dead end. This part they're doing right. (Not saying I'm fond of nomad, but kube is absurd.)
- techntoke 7y ago
  Lol, that is why it took HashiCorp 6 months to write a broken Ansible playbook for Vault that takes an hour to deploy (they couldn't even do it with Terraform) when it takes less than 30 seconds to deploy on Kubernetes natively.
  - mbag 7y ago
    Can you please share a link to ansible playbook and Kubernetes manifest for comaprison?
    - techntoke 7y ago
      You can find the Kubernetes deploy here: https://github.com/hashicorp/vault-helm https://github.com/hashicorp/vault-helm I can't share the Ansible stuff because it isn't public.
      - mbag 7y ago
        Thanks. Too bad Ansible playbooks are not public. To be clear I'm not defending Hashicorp, as I have played quite a bit with their tools (only opensource versions) and getting deployments production ready, can be painful, especially setting up security correctly, with so many moving parts. I know about Helm chart for Vault (btw also created and maintained by Hashicorp). It's quite handy for quick deployments, but getting it to production will require changes, as most security things are disabled. All Helm chart does, it gets Vault up and running, unsealing has to be done either manually or via third party (cool thing, if your use-case allows storing such secret on third party HW). Not to mention, that if you want to use Consul as storage backend, you will have to deal with that using separate chart. Without knowledge what Ansible playbook does, it's hard to compare the two. If ansible is configuring host OS from scratch (updates/tools installation etc) then yes, it might take much longer, then deploying to fully managed K8s cluster.
        techntoke 7y ago
        True, I think the nice thing about Vault Helm chart (and Consul) is that you can swap in the enterprise image. You can customize the image to your liking as well. It is lightweight and easy to scale comparably. There is definitely extra work involved, but the Ansible playbook is just sequential tasks that could be baked into the container and make it a lot faster. I'm a big fan of Kubernetes and Helm/Kustomize as a whole, though there are times where Terraform and Ansible makes sense too.

toomuchtodo 7y ago

As soon as you're working with more than a few people at a time, or in an environment that has compliance, governance, or auditing requirements, you're moving up to Terraform Enterprise (either SaaS or on-prem). I admit you can get pretty far on their OSS offerings, but most folks who need the enterprise features are going to pay for them (SAML/SSO, audit log emissions, private datacenter/on-prem installs, etc). Small shops, startups, and the like? Probably not, but they don't have that much cash anyway; the benefit of marketing to them is a) if they do get big, you're already in the door to sell to them or b) they don't get big, but they grow the ecosystem with engineers knowing and using the products. Those engineers might either end up working for Hashicorp, or landing a gig at a job where they can evangelize the tools and advocate paying for them. Very similar to GitHub's model, and I'd argue it works for everyone; people who can pay, do, people who can't or won't still get value they otherwise wouldn't. IMHO, configuration management compliments Packer and Terraform, it doesn't compete against it (based on my experience using Ansible and Packer for VMs of all sorts). Kubernetes is a beast in itself; the firms who implement Nomad are not the same as those who would go all in on k8s. Personally, I think Kubernetes is overly complex and prefer Nomad as a scheduler, YMMV (my jobs are more batch in nature, less services).

purpleidea 7y ago

> Additionally, I think HashiCorp not embracing kubernetes and trying to push Nomad was a huge miscalculation. Nah, embracing kubernetes is the miscalculation that every other company is making. It's a dead end. This part they're doing right. (Not saying I'm fond of nomad, but kube is absurd.)

techntoke 7y ago
Lol, that is why it took HashiCorp 6 months to write a broken Ansible playbook for Vault that takes an hour to deploy (they couldn't even do it with Terraform) when it takes less than 30 seconds to deploy on Kubernetes natively.
- mbag 7y ago
  Can you please share a link to ansible playbook and Kubernetes manifest for comaprison?
  - techntoke 7y ago
    You can find the Kubernetes deploy here: https://github.com/hashicorp/vault-helm https://github.com/hashicorp/vault-helm I can't share the Ansible stuff because it isn't public.
    - mbag 7y ago
      Thanks. Too bad Ansible playbooks are not public. To be clear I'm not defending Hashicorp, as I have played quite a bit with their tools (only opensource versions) and getting deployments production ready, can be painful, especially setting up security correctly, with so many moving parts. I know about Helm chart for Vault (btw also created and maintained by Hashicorp). It's quite handy for quick deployments, but getting it to production will require changes, as most security things are disabled. All Helm chart does, it gets Vault up and running, unsealing has to be done either manually or via third party (cool thing, if your use-case allows storing such secret on third party HW). Not to mention, that if you want to use Consul as storage backend, you will have to deal with that using separate chart. Without knowledge what Ansible playbook does, it's hard to compare the two. If ansible is configuring host OS from scratch (updates/tools installation etc) then yes, it might take much longer, then deploying to fully managed K8s cluster.
      - techntoke 7y ago
        True, I think the nice thing about Vault Helm chart (and Consul) is that you can swap in the enterprise image. You can customize the image to your liking as well. It is lightweight and easy to scale comparably. There is definitely extra work involved, but the Ansible playbook is just sequential tasks that could be baked into the container and make it a lot faster. I'm a big fan of Kubernetes and Helm/Kustomize as a whole, though there are times where Terraform and Ansible makes sense too.