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Although there's a paywall towards the bottom (is it 25%, 60%, 90% through the article, who can tell?), the above-the-fold resonates and is a reasonable narrati

Although there's a paywall towards the bottom (is it 25%, 60%, 90% through the article, who can tell?), the above-the-fold resonates and is a reasonable narrative about HashiCorp's success. Certainly HashiCorp shines in the UX department. That said, I think there's a another angle: HashiCorp is provider agnostic. HashiCorp tooling naturally lends itself to a multi-cloud strategy because they aren't owned by a cloud provider. Current requirements aside, coupling your business to the whims of Amazon, Google or Microsoft is always a risk. Even Kubernetes, the closest thing to an orchestration standard at scale makes me nervous because Google's needs are not the needs of most businesses, and what happens when they decide to throw their weight around? As long as HashiCorp remains independent, I think it will attract a lot engineering-focused businesses that want to control their own destiny. I hope they can resist the urge to chase the enterprise money dragon to its logical conclusion. We are all better off for having some smaller-scale competition to the cloud behemoths who will only care about developer experience as long as they have to.

ec109685 4y ago
Kubernetes is managed by a foundation so less of a risk than a tool owned by one company.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- tuckerman 4y ago
  I think one way in which it plays out opposite to this is that Kubernetes, among companies I’ve talked to, is being deployed as EKS or GKE with cloud provider specific extensions/integrations while Nomad is much much easier to self manage on top of bare VMs. Even being owned by a single company, there is something about being to self host that feels more “free”. Obviously this could make a 180 easily because of how much control HashiCorp has, but, thus far, they have been pretty good stewards.
  - adra 4y ago
    Wanting to turn on just one more server to find months of lead time and a bunch of red tape to get stuff done, yeah I don't miss "owning the hardware" one bit. In times of economic hardship when finding skilled labor to manage infrastructure is easier to achieve, trading hardware costs for labor costs may make more sense, but I don't see that happening in today's economies for most western economies.
    - tuckerman 4y ago
      I think there is a quiet but noticeable push back to owning hardware for predictable workloads but that’s beside the point. You can run nomad on EC2, GCE, whatever the Azure equivalent is, in addition to bare metal you own. Setting up your own, non-managed Kubernetes cluster is definitely possible but I’d argue it’s on a whole different level of difficulty.
  - kfrzcode 4y ago
    Single point of failure!
- tjr225 4y ago
  Kubernetes absolutely eats the HashiStack lunch. I think they’re aware of this. That’s why I think HashiCorp invested so much VC funding into their SaaS offerings: they know consul, vault, and nomad are a huge pain in the ass to configure and manage, particularly in support of each other. It’s all a little bit more agnostic than k8s but If you actually run consul + vault + nomad in production you know that managing it and repairing it can be a nightmare. GKE or EKS on the other hand feels like I almost shouldn’t even have a job. In fact, two of the most high profile outages in the last two years(Robinhood March 2020 and whatever Roblox outage happened recently) we’re due to consul or vault or something going completely hare brained.
  - Axsuul 4y ago
    As a counterpoint I manage multiple HashiStack clusters in production with little overhead — it's not a nightmare. I am a Kubernetes refugee and Nomad is such a better experience with batteries included. Nomad now has its own service discovery (along with secure variables coming in 1.4.0) so you won't actually need Consul and Vault anymore. This is perfect for smaller deployments like on a Raspberry Pi.
    - jdoss 4y ago
      I came to say pretty much the same thing. Nomad is awesome software. I use Nomad at work for internal workloads and automating its deployment with TLS + Consul is wayyyyyyy easier than k8s. I am really looking forward to 1.4.0. Also, I made some automation for setting up Nomad on a single Fedora CoreOS server (still kind of a work in progress) if anyone wants to give it a try. https://github.com/quickvm/butane-nomad https://github.com/quickvm/butane-nomad
    - sidlls 4y ago
      Are your clusters at the same scale as Robinhood or Roblox? We’re talking many millions of inbound requests per second generating multiples of that on internal service calls. Nomad, Consul and Vault work find at small to medium scales. Sometimes. If things are working really well and there aren’t any real problems on the network. It’s very fragile, though, and tends to shit itself under the slightest bit of abnormal pressure.
threeseed 4y ago
> Google's needs are not the needs of most businesses, and what happens when they decide to throw their weight around Nothing. Because AWS has invested heavily in Kubernetes and they would just fork the whole ecosystem. They've done it in the past with Elasticsearch, Spark etc.

ec109685 4y ago

Kubernetes is managed by a foundation so less of a risk than a tool owned by one company.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
tuckerman 4y ago
I think one way in which it plays out opposite to this is that Kubernetes, among companies I’ve talked to, is being deployed as EKS or GKE with cloud provider specific extensions/integrations while Nomad is much much easier to self manage on top of bare VMs. Even being owned by a single company, there is something about being to self host that feels more “free”. Obviously this could make a 180 easily because of how much control HashiCorp has, but, thus far, they have been pretty good stewards.
- adra 4y ago
  Wanting to turn on just one more server to find months of lead time and a bunch of red tape to get stuff done, yeah I don't miss "owning the hardware" one bit. In times of economic hardship when finding skilled labor to manage infrastructure is easier to achieve, trading hardware costs for labor costs may make more sense, but I don't see that happening in today's economies for most western economies.
  - tuckerman 4y ago
    I think there is a quiet but noticeable push back to owning hardware for predictable workloads but that’s beside the point. You can run nomad on EC2, GCE, whatever the Azure equivalent is, in addition to bare metal you own. Setting up your own, non-managed Kubernetes cluster is definitely possible but I’d argue it’s on a whole different level of difficulty.
- kfrzcode 4y ago
  Single point of failure!
tjr225 4y ago
Kubernetes absolutely eats the HashiStack lunch. I think they’re aware of this. That’s why I think HashiCorp invested so much VC funding into their SaaS offerings: they know consul, vault, and nomad are a huge pain in the ass to configure and manage, particularly in support of each other. It’s all a little bit more agnostic than k8s but If you actually run consul + vault + nomad in production you know that managing it and repairing it can be a nightmare. GKE or EKS on the other hand feels like I almost shouldn’t even have a job. In fact, two of the most high profile outages in the last two years(Robinhood March 2020 and whatever Roblox outage happened recently) we’re due to consul or vault or something going completely hare brained.
- Axsuul 4y ago
  As a counterpoint I manage multiple HashiStack clusters in production with little overhead — it's not a nightmare. I am a Kubernetes refugee and Nomad is such a better experience with batteries included. Nomad now has its own service discovery (along with secure variables coming in 1.4.0) so you won't actually need Consul and Vault anymore. This is perfect for smaller deployments like on a Raspberry Pi.
  - jdoss 4y ago
    I came to say pretty much the same thing. Nomad is awesome software. I use Nomad at work for internal workloads and automating its deployment with TLS + Consul is wayyyyyyy easier than k8s. I am really looking forward to 1.4.0. Also, I made some automation for setting up Nomad on a single Fedora CoreOS server (still kind of a work in progress) if anyone wants to give it a try. https://github.com/quickvm/butane-nomad https://github.com/quickvm/butane-nomad
  - sidlls 4y ago
    Are your clusters at the same scale as Robinhood or Roblox? We’re talking many millions of inbound requests per second generating multiples of that on internal service calls. Nomad, Consul and Vault work find at small to medium scales. Sometimes. If things are working really well and there aren’t any real problems on the network. It’s very fragile, though, and tends to shit itself under the slightest bit of abnormal pressure.

threeseed 4y ago

> Google's needs are not the needs of most businesses, and what happens when they decide to throw their weight around Nothing. Because AWS has invested heavily in Kubernetes and they would just fork the whole ecosystem. They've done it in the past with Elasticsearch, Spark etc.