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HashiCorp Exploring Potential Sale
- hpb42 3y agoIn case one wants to switch from Hashicorp to alternatives that are similar enough or forks, what would that stack be? Hashiternative stack: - vault -> openbao (fork) - terraform -> opentofu (fork) - consul -> ? - nomad -> slurm + something that runs/orchestrates windows jobs? - hcl -> dhall + nix?
- shivsid01 3y agoconsidering taking an internship here... should this affect my thinking?
- tianzhou 3y agoCisco or Okta
- skarlso 3y agoWell. Now the license change and Mitchell leaving makes sense.
- meepmorp 3y agoHe moved to being an IC a few years ago, so Mitchell's departure might've been in progress for a while. And he seems to be having fun writing a terminal emulator in zig.
- tanepiper 3y agoEverything becomes clearer... Glad we already moved to OpenTofu
- ricc 3y agoIt's quite sad to think that Terraform might go the way of Hudson...
- fishnchips 3y agoIt's not the worst possible outcome.
- rapnie 3y agoStill early, but don't forget OpenBao fork of Vault. https://github.com/openbao https://github.com/openbao
- tanepiper 3y agoAmazing - we actually had a secrets PoC for our org paused recently, and Vault is one of the options. But honestly this looks like it could solve a few things in our team right now.
- sanjay313 3y ago[dead]
- sgt 3y agoWhat about OpenMao? https://openmao.panchuang.net/#/ https://openmao.panchuang.net/#/
- cipherboy 3y agoHappy to answer technical questions about OpenBao as people have, though some might be best directed at the Technical Steering Committee, which I do not represent. :-)
- candiddevmike 3y agoI owe you a PR review on the source IP lock, I haven't had time to test it yet. It's awesome that you address it though, thank you.
- cipherboy 3y agoThank you for the RFE! Looking at the X-Forwarded-For handling might be good, I wasn't able to add tests for that easily, though maybe the existing test could be used as a template if you get time. I think we depend on nginx or Caddy elsewhere, but the pkiext tests might also serve as a good reference. :-)
- 3y ago
- cube2222 3y agoAs the tech lead of the OpenTofu project, I can tell you that I'm positively surprised by how quick the uptake has been so far since the stable release! We're also seeing a ton of external contributors jumping in, which has been heartwarming! I also invite anybody using OpenTofu (or considering it) to join our Slack[0], it's quite active there. It's also a great place to influence the shape of new OpenTofu features. Now 1.7 is coming out soon as well, and this week we have OpenTofu Day at KubeCon happening :) [0]: http://opentofu.org/slack http://opentofu.org/slack
- vr46 3y agoJust started a new tiny greenfield infra project for a friend but was too cowardly to use OpenTF after I tried it and found that I needed Hashicorp providers etc, couldn’t be bothered to dig in and untangle. Gotta say, didn’t find opentf docs useful at all. But hoping things go well and one day I’ll be able to just fire things up and it’ll be frictionless.
- cube2222 3y agoSorry to hear that, could you expand on the paint points? Esp. on the friction points, where it was different than just using `tofu` instead of `terraform` in your commands. To answer some of your points: There's no point in forking the providers, as they're still open-source, you're just fetching them from our registry - registry.opentofu.org. Core docs are generally the same as Terraform docs, but we're still missing the registry UI to explore provider docs (and are currently working on a design for that).
- vr46 3y agoMainly because I installed it and ran it on a sample base infra - vpc and subnets - and I noted that it was still picking up Hashicorp providers, fine, but doesn’t this mean I have to run through a large codebase and start switching every provider out? Essentially I wasn’t sure what to do next. Should I stick with my standard terraform setup or figure out shifting to OpenTF and risk getting hit with something not available? Wasn’t something I could figure out in advance, if that makes sense? So was safest to stick with TF.
- sevagh 3y agoWe're still on Terraform 1.5 (pre-license change) and Scalr. Things are still working, fingers crossed. Was there any pain in preserving existing state files and large amounts of existing infrastructure (and terraform repos) when migrating to OpenTofu?
- miduil 3y agoSoftware Company HashiCorp Is Weighing a Potential Sale (bloomberg.com) 65 points by MajimasEyepatch 1 day ago | 49 comments https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39721381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39721381
- tonnydourado 3y agoGod, please, not to Oracle.
- ethbr1 3y agoOut of curiosity, and afaik HashiCorp is not one, how do sales of US-style benefit corporations [0] go? It seems like irrevocable benefits enumerated in corporate bylaws + predecided public-friendly liquidation procedure (i.e. source code / copyright / trademark release) would help fight profit maximization at the expense of product quality. HashiCorp's financials don't look terrible, so I'm assuming this sale is more about individual holders cashing out? [0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefit_corporation
- mfer 3y agoHashiCorp is a public company that is losing money [1]. They still aren’t sustainable financially. [1] https://www.google.com/finance/quote/HCP:NASDAQ https://www.google.com/finance/quote/HCP:NASDAQ
- nottorp 3y agoI thought you should bleed money for the sake of unbounded growth.
- fishnchips 3y agoDepending on how cheap the money is.
- ckdarby 3y agoThey're making progress. Their last quarter shows them decreasing their loss in net income and at the same time increasing their revenue. IMO they're a dying company. Selling is a smart move to push their existing customers a cross sale product to close the loss gap. They'll drop 15 to 30% of their staff. They're not that far from profitability when you realize their staffing cost is high vs the yielding return per employee.
- ethbr1 3y agoMakes sense, since with another product company you could collapse the sales orgs and drastically decrease the marketing+sales costs without impacting revenue.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoHashicorp gave away basically everything valuable they had, and charges extortionate prices for the few features they've paywalled. Only way they're going to survive is by becoming a feature of some bigger cloud offering. We've been leaning into Terraform-based Crossplane providers recently and the out of the box experience is so much better than using terraform cloud once you get crossplane set up, I can't imagine ever going back to vanilla terraform pipelines, and certainly not paying for terraform cloud.
- aliasxneo 3y agoCan you share what provider you are referencing?
- empath-nirvana 3y agohttps://marketplace.upbound.io/providers/upbound/provider-aws/v1.2.0 https://marketplace.upbound.io/providers/upbound/provider-aw...
- davewritescode 3y agoThe high price of Hashicorp doomed them in the end. I don’t know what their financials looked like internally but the quotes we got from sales reps got them laughed out of the room.
- FooBarWidget 3y agoOkay but how much does that really say? All HN/startup advice says that when you sell to enterprises you have to charge enterprise prices. Meanwhile techies are notoriously for preferring to spend a month's worth of salary building an FTP server to replace Dropbox with.
- empath-nirvana 3y agoHashicorp's prices are not what i'd consider to be 'enterprise prices'. When we looked at buying "enterprise vault" a few years ago it was six figures a year for a relatively small install. It was basically "we don't want your business" pricing.
- geraldwhen 3y agoI can’t wait to be forced to migrate off vault. Such a useful use of my time.
- syslog 3y agoOh god.
- cosmosgenius 3y agoI chuckled when i saw your username. syslog producing "Oh god" for "vault condition".
- candiddevmike 3y agoCheckout openbao, a Vault fork: https://github.com/openbao/openbao https://github.com/openbao/openbao
- illusive4080 3y agoIs there a good open source secret management abstraction that works for both containers and serverless? I’d love to use one library to connect to AWS SM and Vault and whatever we replace Vault with.
- kmos 3y agoAnother buy for Broadcom ? =)
- fishnchips 3y agoPlease don’t. I can’t eat this much popcorn.
- prepend 3y agoIs there any dev friendly company that buys companies like this? Oracle would make it suck more. Microsoft, Amazon, or Google would make it less portable and do they buy infrastructure projects like this? Would Cisco maybe consider this infrastructure in all their customers stacks? Or Facebook could buy as a vanity project to just get mindspace with developers?
- giancarlostoro 3y agoMaybe Cloudflare? It would be weird, but it would probably not ruin HashiCorp. Or the Linux Foundation itself somehow?
- IggleSniggle 3y agoCloudflare is a very interesting idea from a user perspective
- LVB 3y agoThat would be interesting given their sort-of fall out? (https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1522098889423163394 https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1522098889423163394)
- Macha 3y agoIs there more context than the single tweet? Twitter doesn't display threads to non-users anymore and Nitter is dead, so I can't see if the follow up mentioned ever happened.
- internetter 3y agoNo, not in that thread at least
- LVB 3y agoNo, and I don't recall anything about that "#staytuned" materializing. IIRC this was related to a license renewal that got ugly.
- pizzafeelsright 3y agoMy guess is it'll be IBM. Based upon some research into numbers... They'll absorb the talent. Expand IBMs offering of Vault-ish product while basically reselling Vault as a line item addition to their existing line items. Less pain for IBM from license drama and the selling of open source Vault with an IBM tweak to a MUCH larger user base with zero sales expense. IBM gets all Vault talent Hashi gets massive market without sales Hashi is $800MM revenue because of 80% sales and marketing.
- candiddevmike 3y agoIBM is backing OpenTofu and OpenBao AFAIK. They're supposedly one of the main reasons for the licensing change. Cisco was looking to buy HC years ago, I would bet they're still interested (wonder if it will be for less money...)
- tinyspacewizard 3y agoCould easily be leverage in the negotiation.
- master_crab 3y agoIBM is a good guess but it would probably be more accurate at this stage to point at anyone that missed the cloud wars and are claiming to be a “multi-cloud manager.” Definitely IBM, maybe Nutanix, possibly Broadcom. Hell, maybe even Cisco.
- mandeepj 3y ago> My guess is it'll be IBM. Could have Cisco as well! They are a lot more engaged in transforming themselves and doing a lot of M&A
- fideloper 3y agoWhat happens to their stock if they sell?
- neom 3y agoAs soon as it's formally announced, It moves to the price they agreed to sell for, and then you can either sell them on the open market for that price, or hold them and convert them to shares of the company acquiring. There may be a tax benefit to you doing one or the other, so I'd consult a tax advisor. Personally, I lost a shitload of money on HashiCorp. I've "emotionally bought" 2 stocks in my life and Hashi is one of them. I like Mitchell and Armon very much, they're actually seriously great humans, both of them, but that's an awful reason to buy a stock. If I can break even and they sell for the IPO price I'll be very pleased, but that seems impossible heh. :)
- dainiusse 3y agoDepends on the deal, but you can look at other m&as to have rought idea.
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- yoyohello13 3y agoWhew, glad we moved away from vagrant already.
- albert_e 3y agoFor teams using or considering Terraform as IaC, what are the implications if any?
- fishnchips 3y agoFor Terraform there should be none, since you have drop-in alternatives for both the base product and the commercial platform (disclosure: I’m involved in OpenTofu and Spacelift, respectively). Other tooling may be more problematic. Vault has an open source fork in the works but nowhere near production readiness AFAIK.
- barfbagginus 3y ago[dead]
- ChrisArchitect 3y ago[dupe] More discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39721381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39721381
- yevpats 3y agoHere is a free tip to fix terraform business model (no MBA required): - Terraform is one of the most valuable tools for IaC - it's all free and it shouldn't - it is not a consumer product, it is not running ads and 99% of the users are business users with money. - Keep Terraform SDK free and open source, close source plugins, charge per resource. - Invest much more into Core and plugins. all forks are doomed with the same destiny, business model is not sustainable with negative margin - as long as you have such a generous free tier and storage can run on S3 the price you can ask for a managed version is incredibly low. You welcome :)
- hintymad 3y agoI always thought Hashi's technologies would lose their lustres soon. My previous company used to use Terraform and Nomad. They are like Graphite 10 years ago: darling of the open source community, good for small companies, but eventually becoming a productivity nightmare. There are just so many bizarre decisions and the accidental complexity of Hashi's family bucket is just through the roof. The one that I hate most is its embedding of Jinja template to inject system configurations. I mean why in the world would someone separate the service configuration from a service itself and force engineers to take care of service configurations in a separate places while learning so many irrelevant details: Terraform, Jinja, string escaping, embedded language, integration with the deployment environment, and the official docs do not help that much. They seem contain everything, but it's just so hard to connect the dots.
- sunshine-o 3y agoSo far I haven't seen any fork or alternative to Nomad emerge. What is particularly worrisome when you need something lightweight and to support non containerized services...