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There's no overall consensus within engineering about the change itself. What is amusing is that most of the public response has been aimed at Terraform whilst

There's no overall consensus within engineering about the change itself. What is amusing is that most of the public response has been aimed at Terraform whilst internally Terraform wasn't the concern. Gruntworks and the others were not mentioned internally. It was Vault. It was IBM.

jsiepkes 3y ago
Interesting. I'm curious, was it fear of IBM or was there a concrete threat from IBM which was already eating Hashicorp's lunch and was an existential threat? I have a hard time imagining why anyone would choose IBM's offering over Hashicorp's offering unless they would already be up until their necks into IBM stuff. I also wouldn't really expect the IBM and Hashicorp customer base to overlap much?
- natbennett 3y ago
  “Application Modernization” is a huge deal in enterprise. In practice this means some combination of “make it slightly easier to get production traffic to new Java apps” and “deploy a lot of Kubernetes clusters.” Really they want the former but the k8s became a proxy for the capability. It’s why IBM bought RedHat. Hashicorp products are a very big part of this world. I’d expect that basically every IBM customer also uses Hashicorp products, but they may or may not have a commercial relationship with Hashicorp.
- stanac 3y ago
  > why anyone would choose IBM's offering over Hashicorp's offering Because everyone know IBM and mostly only devs know about Hashicorp. There is that saying "No one ever got fired for buying IBM".
- toomuchtodo 3y ago
  IBM has lots of old enterprise mindshare. Existing relationships are the value. Selling Vault just becomes another line item in your IBM contract. Very similar how AWS just repackages open source products and sells them themselves (Elastic). If you don’t protect yourself from these entrenched enterprise marketing machines, you’re dead. (Brought Vault into an old, stodgy org, was a schlep)
  - SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
    There’s even a whole cottage business around getting your app on the AWS marketplace and handling billing through AWS. Once it’s on the marketplace it becomes much more appealing to a set of B2B customers because it’s way easier internally to just add some $X,000 line item to your AWS ‘cloud’ bill than to go though the lengthy procurement and approval process of onboarding a new vendor
cipherboy 3y ago
I don't think this is a valid take. Some, like myself, have left over this issue. Many discussions happened in private for various obvious reasons. But your reasoning at the end was not my understanding. That said, I have nothing but respect for my former colleagues there. Some of the best engineers have I worked with are still at Hashicorp. :-) Disclaimer: Views my own, not that of any past, present, or future employer.

jsiepkes 3y ago

Interesting. I'm curious, was it fear of IBM or was there a concrete threat from IBM which was already eating Hashicorp's lunch and was an existential threat? I have a hard time imagining why anyone would choose IBM's offering over Hashicorp's offering unless they would already be up until their necks into IBM stuff. I also wouldn't really expect the IBM and Hashicorp customer base to overlap much?

natbennett 3y ago
“Application Modernization” is a huge deal in enterprise. In practice this means some combination of “make it slightly easier to get production traffic to new Java apps” and “deploy a lot of Kubernetes clusters.” Really they want the former but the k8s became a proxy for the capability. It’s why IBM bought RedHat. Hashicorp products are a very big part of this world. I’d expect that basically every IBM customer also uses Hashicorp products, but they may or may not have a commercial relationship with Hashicorp.
stanac 3y ago
> why anyone would choose IBM's offering over Hashicorp's offering Because everyone know IBM and mostly only devs know about Hashicorp. There is that saying "No one ever got fired for buying IBM".
toomuchtodo 3y ago
IBM has lots of old enterprise mindshare. Existing relationships are the value. Selling Vault just becomes another line item in your IBM contract. Very similar how AWS just repackages open source products and sells them themselves (Elastic). If you don’t protect yourself from these entrenched enterprise marketing machines, you’re dead. (Brought Vault into an old, stodgy org, was a schlep)
- SOLAR_FIELDS 3y ago
  There’s even a whole cottage business around getting your app on the AWS marketplace and handling billing through AWS. Once it’s on the marketplace it becomes much more appealing to a set of B2B customers because it’s way easier internally to just add some $X,000 line item to your AWS ‘cloud’ bill than to go though the lengthy procurement and approval process of onboarding a new vendor

cipherboy 3y ago

I don't think this is a valid take. Some, like myself, have left over this issue. Many discussions happened in private for various obvious reasons. But your reasoning at the end was not my understanding. That said, I have nothing but respect for my former colleagues there. Some of the best engineers have I worked with are still at Hashicorp. :-) Disclaimer: Views my own, not that of any past, present, or future employer.