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Comment by that_guy_iain | Hacker News Reader

When HashiCorp first got announced I thought "How is he going to make a company out of Vagrant?" I was definitely wrong and on my own projects I'm using lots of their products from packer to nomad. Super cool to see someone/people create something like HashiCorp out of what I originally thought would be a single product.

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To me, the more astonishing thing is, "How did HashiCorp excel where Docker failed". I'd pay to read a case-study on it, if there's one.

Edit: May be this comment from Mitchell sheds some 1st-party perspective on why it may be so:

> ...Terraform is WORKFLOW agnostic, not TECHNOLOGY agnostic. This is a key part of our product philosophy that we make the 1st element of our Tao: https://www.hashicorp.com/tao-of-hashicorp

> I've talked about this more with more references in this tweet: https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1078682765963350016

> I don't think we've ever claimed cloud portability through "write once run anywhere;" that isn't our marketing or sales pitch and if we ever did make that claim please let me know and I'll poke some teams to correct it. Our pitch is always to just learn one workflow/tool and use it everywhere, but you explicitly WILL rewrite cloud-specific modules/code/etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29051020

I think a big part of it is that Docker failed to expand much beyond their initial offering. They tried, but weren't able to get much traction. HashiCorp probably wouldn't be IPOing with a multi-billion dollar valuation if they continued to focus mainly on Vagrant.

The Terraform ecosystem worked with VM's - big difference vs. Docker. The VMware ecosystem spends a TON of money on software.

It wasn't until they launched Vault that I saw where they were going commercially. Their other tools were excellent, but I wouldn't be surprised if Vault would be their #1 cash-cow, it's a massively useful tool in environments that require a support umbrella and love paying for expensive licensing.

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