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Well, it was nice while it lasted! HashiCorp always felt like a company made by actual engineers, not "bean counters". Now it will just be another cog in the IB
by calgoo 3y ago
Well, it was nice while it lasted! HashiCorp always felt like a company made by actual engineers, not "bean counters". Now it will just be another cog in the IBM machine, slowly grinding it down, removing everything attractive, just like RedHat and CentOS.
Hopefully this will create a new wave off innovation, and someone will create something to replace the monopoly on IaC that IBM now owns.
- tithe 3y agoThe timing of this acquisition, and the FTC's ban on non-compete agreements is perfect.
- binarymax 3y agoUsually during an acquisition like this, the key staff are paid out after two years on board the new company. So not a non-compete, but an incentive to stay and get their payout. Most staff with no equity will leave quickly of course, so the invalidity of non compete will definitely help those souls.
- cratermoon 3y ago"golden handcuffs" they call them.
- unstatusthequo 3y agoBan isn’t yet in effect and would have started discussions a while back. Plus, FTC ban is already being litigated by business groups, unsurprisingly.
- andrewstuart2 3y agoHonestly, Mitchell should still be very proud of what he built and the legacy of Hashicorp. Sure, the corp has taken a different direction lately but thanks to the licenses of the Hashicorp family of software, it's almost entirely available for forking and re-homing by the community that helped build it up to this point. E.g. opentofu and openbao. I'm sure other projects may follow and the legacy will endure, minus (or maybe not, you never know) contributions from the company they built to try to monetize and support that vision.
- rank0 3y agoI don’t understand people’s beef with IBM. They have been responsible for incredible R&D within computing. I even LIKE redhat/fedora! HashiCorp had already been sold out since waaaay before this acquisition and I also don’t understand why their engineers are seen as “special”…
- Rinzler89 3y agoPeople's beef here with IBM is they don't make shiny phones and laptops and don't create hip jobs where you're paid 500k+ to "change the world" by selling ads or making the 69th messaging app. They just focus on tried and tested boring SW that big businesses find useful and that's not popular on HN which is more startup and disruption focused.
- redserk 3y agoThis is unnecessarily dismissive. While Hashicorp hasn’t been exciting for a while, I fail to see how an acquisition from IBM will invigorate excitement, much less even a neutral reaction from many developers. Hashicorp had a huge hand in defining and popularizing the modern DevOps procedures we now declare as best practices. That’s a torch to hold that would be very difficult for a business like IBM. Perhaps I missed some things but the core of Ansible feels like it’s continuing it’s path to be much less of a priority over the paid value-adds. I can’t help but to think the core of Hashicorp’s products will go down this path, hence my pessimism.
- JojoFatsani 3y agoDo you mean Terraform, not Ansible?
- roland-s 3y agoIBM owns Ansible, redserk is saying Terraform will go a similar route. Although I don't see what they mean by core being lower priority than paid. The paid features are all available for free via AWX, which is the open source upstream of the paid product AAP.
- jbm 3y agoA lot of the people I respected from Heroku went there, glad they got a chance to use their skills to build something useful and profitable; glader still that they got their payout. Sadly I echo your sentiment about the future, as someone who has heard second-hand about the quality of work at modern Redhat. I am wondering how many more rounds of consolidation are left until there is no more space to innovate and we only have ossified rent-seeking entities in the IT space.
- nomat 3y agoour current economic model kind of depends on the idea that we can always disrupt the status quo with american free market ingenuity once it begins to stagnate but maybe we have reached the limits of what friedman's system can do or accounted for.
- buxtehude 3y agoThe American market is highly over regulated and most market libertarians would argue it hasn't been "free" in a long long time.
- glenngillen 3y agoHeh at “got their payout”. HashiCorp IPO’d at $80, employees are locked up for 6 months. This sale is at $35.
- jnsaff2 3y ago> HashiCorp always felt like a company made by actual engineers. IDK about this, in 2018 I was in a position to pay for their services. They asked for stupid amount of money and got none because they asked so much. Can't remember what the exact numbers were but but it felt like ElasticSearch or Oracle.
- afavour 3y agoInability to price things correctly sounds exactly like engineer behavior to me…
- freedomben 3y agoSame. I wanted to pay them for their features, but the pricing was such that I actually thought it was a gag or a troll at first and laughed. When I realized they were serious, I was like Homer fading into the bushes.
- raffraffraff 3y agoSame. And I didn't feel like we were getting anything for that crazy money aside from than "support" (which management wanted, pre IPO, to make a bunch of security audits seem easier ). We preferred to stick with our own tooling and services that we built around Vault (for example) than use the official enterprise stuff. Same goes for terraform today: I don't feel like we need Terraform Cloud, when we've got other options in that space, including home grown tooling.
- kensey 3y agoVault's client-based pricing was (is) the worst thing about selling it. When I was there, nobody in sales liked it except the SEs and account reps dealing with the largest customers (and those customers loved it because it actually saved them a substantial amount of money over other vendors' models like per-use or per-secret). All the customers except those very largest ones hated it. The repeated response from those who believed in the client-based pricing model, to those of us pointing out the issues with it, was essentially "if your customers don't like it, they must not understand it because you aren't doing a good enough job explaining it". What I thought we really needed was a "starter/enterprise" dual-model pricing structure, so that smaller customers could get pricing in some unit they could understand and budget for, that would naturally and predictably grow as they grew, to a point where it would actually be beneficial to them to switch to client-based pricing -- but there seemed to be a general reluctance to have anything but a single pricing model for any of our products.
- renegade-otter 3y agoHashi code, such as Terraform, was (is) an amazing example of a good reference Go codebase. It was very hard for me to get into Go because, outside of the language trivia and hype, it was hard to learn about the patterns and best practices needed for building even a mid-sized application.
- hpeter 3y agoThat's interesting. I found Go to be a very productive and easy language, coming from Typescript. But I had a similar experience like yours with PHP, I just couldn't get into it.
- renegade-otter 3y agoI find the claims that Go is easy just wrong. It's actually a harder language to write in because without discipline, you are going to end up maintaining massive amounts of boilerplate. That's from someone who did a bunch - Perl, Ruby, Python, Java, C++, Scala. Syntax is one thing, assembling an application with maintainable code is something else.
- NomDePlum 3y agoWhat in particular did you find difficult building a maintainable codebase in Golang? Not quite understanding the boilerplate reference. Code generation in Golang is something I've found removed a lot of boilerplate.
- renegade-otter 3y agoI am not used to writing code where 2/3 of it is "if err" statements. Also, refactoring my logging statements so I could see the chain of events seemed like work I rarely had to do in other languages. It's a language the designers of which - with ALL due respect - clearly have not built a modern large application in decades.
- 3y ago
- cedws 3y agoI see this as an opportunity. Not to replace HashiCorp's products - OpenTofu and OpenBao are snapping up most of the mindshare for now - but to build another OSS-first developer darling company.
- joshmanders 3y agoOnboardbase is a great alternative to HashiCorp Vault. https://onboardbase.com/ https://onboardbase.com/
- cube2222 3y agoBtw. OpenTofu 1.7.0 is coming out next week, which is the first release that contains meaningful Tofu-exclusive features! We just released the release candidate today. State encryption, provider-defined functions on steroids, removed blocks, and a bunch more things are coming, see our docs for all the details[0]. We've also had a fun live-stream today, covering the improvements we're bringing to provider-defined functions[1]. [0]: https://opentofu.org/docs/next/intro/whats-new/ https://opentofu.org/docs/next/intro/whats-new/ [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OXBv0MYalY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OXBv0MYalY
- mootpt 3y agoi can only speak to the early days (joined around 11 folks), but the engineers then were top tier and hungry to build cool shit. A few years later (as an outsider) seemed innovation had slowed substantially. i still know there are great folks there, but has felt like HashiCorp’s focus lately has been packaging up all their tools into a cohesive all-in-one solution (this was actually Atlas in the early days) and figuring out their story around service lifecycle with experiments like Waypoint (Otto in the early days). IBM acquisition is likely best outcome.
- BossingAround 3y agoIsn't that how it always is as any company matures? In a big company, you don't need just 5-star devs. You also need a 3-star devs (and even 2-star devs) that work 9 to 3:30 (and maybe do emails/slack between 3:30 - 4; bonus points if they study from 4 to 5). You need people that can take basic requirements and turn them into code that your 5-star devs are too bored to write. You need people who look at customer bugs, can do debugging and submit a patch to fix a corner case your 5-star dev didn't think about 4 years when they were hopped up on caffeine, hopes and dreams.
- sureglymop 3y agoRegarding Red Hat, I dearly hope someone will replace the slow complicated mess that is ansible. It's crazy that this seems to be the best there is...
- alecsm 3y agoWhy slow and complicated? We're just starting to implement it and we've only heard good things about it.
- dontdoxxme 3y agoAnsible is great if you have workflows where sysadmins SSH to servers manually. It can pretty much take that workflow and automate it. The problem is it doesn’t go much beyond that, so you’re limited by SSH roundtrip latency and it’s a pain to parallelize (you end up either learning lots of options or mitogen can help). However fundamentally you’re still SSHing to machines, when really at scale you want some kind of agent on the machine (although ansible is a reasonable way to bootstrap something else).
- dapf 3y ago[dead]
- madcadmium 3y agoWhen I managed a large fleet of EC2 instances running CentOS I had Ansible running locally on each machine via a cron job. I only used remote SSH to orchestrate deployments (stop service, upgrade, test, put back in service).
- alecsm 3y agoWell, that's exactly what we need. Our servers are growing in numbers and it's a pain in the ass the log into each one of them via SSH and do stuff.
- sureglymop 3y agoThere is Mitogen [0] that helps a bit. Their website also kind of explain some of the issues: > Requiring minimal configuration changes, it updates Ansible’s slow and wasteful shell-centric implementation with pure-Python equivalents, invoked via highly efficient remote procedure calls to persistent interpreters tunnelled over SSH. No changes are required to target hosts. Then of course python itself is not very performant and yaml is quite the mess too. With ansible, you have global variables, group level variables that can override them, host level variables that can override those, role level variables, play/book level variables that can override those and ad-hoc level variables that can override all of the above. I am telling you, it can get incredibly messy and needlessly complicated quickly. As I said though, it's still the best we've got even if not optimal. So I think it's a good idea to implement it to at least have something. [0]: https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/ansible_detailed.html https://mitogen.networkgenomics.com/ansible_detailed.html
- cjk2 3y agoMy personal opinion is it was a company for crack monkeys. Consul, Vault and Packer have been nothing but pain and misery for me over the last few years. The application of these technologies has been nothing but a loss of ROI and sanity on a promise. And don't get me started on Terraform, which is a promise but rarely delivers. It's bad enough that a whole ecosystem appeared around it (like terragrunt) to patch up the holes in it.
- skywhopper 3y agoWhen a massive ecosystem springs up around a product, that means it’s wildly successful, actually.
- rad_gruchalski 3y agoThe person you are replying to made no statement about the success of the product. Success and pita-ness are completely orthogonal.
- cjk2 3y agoYeah I'm not saying it's not successful. It's just shit!
- skywhopper 3y agoIt was this, but hasn’t been for a couple of years at least. The culture really shifted once it was clear the pivot to becoming a SaaS-forward company wasn’t taking off. As soon as the IPO happened and even a little bit before, it felt like the place was being groomed down from somewhere unique and innovative to a standardized widget that would be attractive to enterprise-scale buyers like VMware or IBM.
- pjmlp 3y agoWhat we are seeing with VC driven "innovation", is only going to get worse when the Linux/BSD founders generation is gone.