Terraform Cloud Pricing Changes Sticker Shock
shavingtheyak.com
shavingtheyak.com
It's LLM-assisted/bloated fluff which it pretty much admits (with some more LLM-y fluff) right at the start
https://shavingtheyak.com/2023/10/29/seo-generative-ai-and-t...
> I will use generative AI for ‘color’ content like pictures and icons due to factors like cost and time, but I don’t intend to use AI for anything else at all other than possibly helping me sort through ideas or summarizing pertinent information from overly long articles.
TFA doesn't read like ChatGPT nonsense and it provides some interesting discussion. It looks like it's just a new technical blog someone created and is earnestly sharing with HN.
If you look around right now, it seems generative AI is all the rage. There is a growing pool of people now out there who:
[bulleted list]
Lets think about what generative AI can do right now and what this could mean for web content and organically generated search traffic going forward:
Right now, generative AI can:
[bulleted list]
Lets take a look at the web for a second. Websites are what? Text. Images. Sometimes videos or music and sounds. Sometimes websites are dynamic and interactive, like web applications. All of these things can and will be created using generative AI. The use of generative AI to save time creating these things will increase exponentially over time.
This is original writing the way trying to meet the word or page count for your middle school homework is original writing.
So after the whole community contributed a lot of providers, they want to profit from that.
You should use OpenTofu and buy IAC from one of the companies sponsoring full-time engineers on that project: Spacelift, env0, Harness or Scalr.
It was very sad to see
I would not recommend using OpenTofu in production until they've had their first official release though. They currently have some alpha releases out that you can experiment with.
> You may download or copy the Content (and other items displayed on the Services for download) for personal non-commercial use only
https://web.archive.org/web/20201106225027/https://registry....
Apparently a lot of the actual images are hosted on the GitHub container registry (ghcr.io), and in many cases, the Terraform registry is just passing the request through to download an image from a repo that may be owned by someone else.
So in effect, they're putting scary licensing text on a lot of content they have no control over.
Right now we're working on the stable registry[1,2], and that's basically the main blocker left to a full stable release. You can track the progress in our weekly updates[3].
Note: Interim Tech Lead of the OpenTofu project
[0]: https://github.com/opentofu/registry
[1]: https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/issues/741
[2]: https://github.com/opentofu/registry-stable
[3]: https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu/blob/main/WEEKLY_UPDATE...
And it may be true that you are providing 1000X the value! But that doesn't mean that you are going to be able to get away with charging 1000X the price when the cost of hiring a team to fully replace your product with something built in house is only 10X or 100X.
Snowflake doesn't have this problem because very few companies could recreate Snowflake, period, much less recreate it for less than their Snowflake spend. But all these "hosted open source product" offerings should have realized by now that they need a ceiling on their pricing structure and/or they need to stop open sourcing their code.
1. Building it inhouse
2. Using someone who is capturing <100% of value provided.
Then the only "moat" you have is lock-in, but clients tend to not like that, and you're squandering your reputational capital.
I get that companies want to price their products in a way that they don't leave surplus value on the table (i.e. the more value a customer gets out of it, the more expensive the product gets), but the fundamental problem is that it's... so hard to actually "judge" the value that's being created by using the product in many cases.
In such cases, probably for the best that companies err on the side of caution with some formula they're sure is below the actual value but isn't too far away.
The clients I had where we installed snowflake every is super worried about any additional copy operation because everyone is keenly aware of the unlimited cost. This makes getting shit done harder.
Clients that have a decently sized k8s cluster running Trino or old school Spark/Hadoop cluster on fat VM's you know what you got you know what your paying for you make estimate of how much ram / cores you need for certain workloads and once they are purchased your engineers get really good at squeezing as much work out of the given resources as possible. And no constant complaining in meetings about what potential extra cost this additional computation may have.
Also if other people working in other parts of your org don't run snowflake themselves you gotta pay for their snowflake usage on your bill or you pay for copying data back out to S3/ADLS/sFTP so that other departments can get to the results of your computations. And snowflake really doesn't like it when you do this, they even gave exporting data a new name, they call it "unloading" making you feel like your undoing something which you probably should not undo.... On that note, Snowflakes data export options are significantly underdeveloped in contrast to Databricks, Cloudera and also the original open versions Spark, Trino and Impala.
</rant> :)
Their pricing has always been opaque. Despite trying my hardest, even multiple phone calls with their sales teams, I never got even a sniff of how much it would cost for enterprise deployments of Hashicorp products at any of my clients.
I’m a shareholder in HCP and lost money on them after the IPO, so maybe I’m a bit sore, but I’m dumping my holdings soon. I’ve got no confidence this company actually knows how to sell into the bulk of the addressable market that they outlined in their S1.
I think the growth they are currently generating will top out pretty soon when the shock of paying about the same for the management tools as the actual cloud services they are running hits home with their customers.
Their pricing models are actually insane. For Vault Enterprise, you buy into a fixed limited number of clients with a pricing ladder that would make Apple blush. You start at 100 “service tokens” with the next level being 1000, 2500, and 50000 tokens. Any “service” that needs to connect to vault is a client, and the definition of a service is pretty loose. For Kubernetes / compose stacks, any one pod / running container is a service.
It gets worse: Once a token has been claimed, it can no longer be used by a different client for the entire billing period (meaning: a year). This means that you can run out of valid client tokens, even if you're only actively using half if you spent the other half for testing purposes or no longer run the architecture that used up those tokens. Oh, and users are clients, too.
All in all, the ballpark moved somewhere in the low six figures for their 100-token agreement, if I remember correctly. We had to decline because Vault alone would've cost a large part of our infrastructure budget.
Also I wonder if same user having multiple different tokens would count as different tokens... Probably, just to inflate the number...
Their sales and marketing is pretty bloated and is destroying all of their gross profit alone.
Their stock seems to be priced on the hopes and dreams that they'll grow revenue out of their current problems before they run out of cash. But the headline and the reactions here show how they're trying to do that.
Make sure to check out Spacelift[0]. It’s a CI/CD specialized in Infra as Code. Terraform/OpenTofu are first-class citizens and it brings advanced customizability with cross-statefile dependencies, OPA-policies (not just for access control, but e.g. customizing your gitops flow) and others.
The pricing is reasonable, too, and not per-resource. Generally based around concurrency.
Disclaimer: I work at Spacelift, but I do legitimately think it's a great product and recommend it.
[0]: https://spacelift.io
Also, is the Enterprise plan significantly more expensive than the cloud plan?
Yes, though not by minute, but by "max concurrency" over a month, with some room for bursts.
> Also, is the Enterprise plan significantly more expensive than the cloud plan?
It's quite a bit more expensive. I do recommend contacting our sales team[0] and presenting your use-case, though, to get more details. You can definitely work something out with them.
Thanks!
For us (and I'm guessing for many VC funded companies), SAAS managed IAC is a nice to have, but certainly not a MUST-have and certainly not something in the same "willing to spend money range" as your monitoring or your main cloud hosting costs.
I see these kind of tools as a tier below your monitoring tools like DataDog/Splunk etc. And these tools are a tier below your AWS/GCP costs. If your IAC or CI costs are approaching or overtaking your monitoring costs, something weird is afoot. Likewise, if your Datadog costs are approaching your AWS bill, this is obviously wrong.
Hashicorp, in my opinion, thinks their tool is more mission-critical and more of a value-add than in reality it actually is, and I think they also don't understand that in the current high interest rate environment, companies are FAR more willing to put in engineering time to do migrations or money saving projects. My own company put in 100s of hours of Engineering time to reduce the Datadog bill by roughly 40-50%.
As a disclaiming I'm currently writing a book on Terraform, and I've been interacting with a lot of the people in the space. Up until a few years ago I was a huge fan of Hashicorp, but their price changes and lack of support were what made it so I couldn't recommend Terraform Cloud anymore. The license changes they made were the icing on that cake.
Proprietary also can mean a well-funded product with money allocated to DevEx and ease-of-use.
There are other ways that are not proprietary and don't require self-hosting.
> Proprietary also can mean a well-funded product with money allocated to DevEx and ease-of-use.
How did that work out for Heroku?
Also, Heroku’s buildpacks were anything but proprietary. They’ve been adopted by a bunch of other products.
Sure, the concept of buildpacks were copied to other platforms (I personally worked on building one of those platforms, Cloud Foundry), but they were a proprietary solution that others adopted for ease of transition off of Heroku, not because it was some great solution to IaC.
Obviously, it's not a perfect system, and it doesn't indefinitely scale, but it worked well enough.
You can see a list on the left-hand side here: https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/language/settings/...
For example, I've use S3 as my Terraform backend for years, but I've never bothered to set up the locking feature, which uses DynamoDB.
In a small team that deploys Terraform changes rarely, you may never encounter the problems solved by using locking. Maybe good communication and a Slack channel works well enough for you.
IMHO If you are serious, dump the metrics into bigquery/redshift and start doing sql like an adult.
A pretty minor nitpick, but indicative of the level of attention they give the product.
I keep hearing something about a company that switched their monitoring from DataDog to DataBricks and I can see that yes you probably could go build a monitoring solution on top of a datastore like that. But I certainly wouldn't want to.
It's a bit like "you can write everything you want in assembler without the overhead of extra layers of X". Yeah, sure, I can. But I appreciate the extra layers of X. I'll take the right cost/convenience balance, like an adult, thank you.
The labor and capital cost savings for moving to the cloud and SaaS were to get you there and get you dependent. Now that you don’t have in house IT anymore it’s time to turn the screws. You will soon be paying 2-3X what self hosted internal IT cost.
The the pendulum will start to swing the other way. This is one of those endless cycles in software and IT. Get ready for Harvard Business Review articles about how much someone saved exiting cloud.
Now that the VC subsidy is over, and we’re into the gouge all those billions back from the people you’ve hooked onto your drug phase of the adoption cycle, it’s entirely possible some investors and technologists might see an opportunity in helping companies break out of that situation.
So we may actually see some investment and effort in bringing in house tech up to par.
A Raspberry Pi 5 has more power than a huge NT back office server in the late 1990s or early 2000s.
The cloud hid 20 years of progress more or less. Things got more powerful but cloud prices didn’t come down at the same rate. Cloud providers pocketed the difference.
The void for on prem is mostly in the software. There just aren’t good management solutions or modern devops stacks for it. The hardware is way more than adequate. It’s also a lot more reliable than it used to be. Spinning disk is dead unless you are warehousing massive amounts of data.
I feel like we are ripe for another turn of the on-prem/off-prem wheel.
Then, of course, once it's all back on-prem we will once again have price gouging monopolies (probably in software) and someone will have the bright idea of moving everything to... what will they call it next time? Maybe "the grid" instead of "the cloud?"
My team maintains our own Terraform providers, Ansible playbooks, bare metal management infra, CLI tooling, network automation, ITSM integration, on-prem Kubernetes running on metal in our own DCs, on-prem CI/CD, on-prem Gitlab, evolving IDP, etc.
SaaS, what SaaS?
Look at their gross vs net margin. Where is the money spent? How much engineers vs. non engineers do they employ? Did they acquire naming rights to a stadium?
My company was just hit by an egregious 6.5x price increase from one of those managed open source companies. A cool $7m per year delta. We will feel sore for a year, since we were told 2 months in advance of the new pricing, and we will migrate off it easily for the demonstrable ROI. I didnt even need to ask the C suite for the migration money, they were so pissed.
Azure DevOps does a good enough job for us.
The infrastructure and people that 'back end' your organization have value. This is intuitively true, but for the folks who are customer facing (and often senior management) there is often a minimization of that value.
Open source really cut the cost of that back end, and reinforced the uninformed opinion that this stuff wasn't worth all that much.
Once you're tied to a platform, because it's "cost effective", that platform can then say, "Okay, now it's time to start charging you for the real value we provide." That leaves the operations folks going to management saying "Hey our costs are going way up, kthxbye" And usually starts an uncomfortable education cycle where the real cost of running the business gets penciled out. Sometimes it kills companies.
The <thing><as a service> provider gets to set pretty much an arbitrary price on their value.
If you have followed the saga of Music you know that the "labels" who hold all the copyrights (generally) always win at keeping all the money for themselves and thus kill business after business that would help the artists. This as-a-service(AAS) companies can do the same thing. It's one of the interesting things for me about 0xide and making 'on prem' a thing again.
It feels like another shift is coming and this is a preview of what the motivations for the shift will be.
And lastly I'm not a fan of AI generated illustrations in a blog post.
Why not? I thought that the illustrations fit the article better than the bland and irrelevant stock photos people usually use.
As an aside: I figure that in about 3-4 years, no one will be able to assert that they do or don’t like AI generated art because there won’t be any way to know if it’s man made, machine made, or reality.
[0]: https://terrateam.io
This already exists[0]. Still in development but it looks promising.
i think there’s only 2 paths forward: host your own (short term) and cloud providers will offer this for free / lower cost (long term)
i think google and aws and the others will be strong at this in 5 years and will direct customers to iac more than clicking through a website. or simply offer better tools. the iac solutions today are just bandaids on poor user experiences in bigger products
Resource-based pricing was the original pricing model for what is now Terraform Cloud (Atlas as-was).
Very shitty that a managed kubernetes cluster and a domain record can supposedly be boiled down to the same value now. My state is in S3 + Dynamo DB now.
Inertia is stronger than we think. Large corps would rather pay more than move to another (cheaper) solution. The downside is asymmetrical (and catastrophically so), so no CTO or CEO would take such risks.
If people just want to vent about Hashicorp/Terraform, it seems like a text-post would be sufficient for that.
1) "Crediting" the source models explicitly.
2) Generating away or cleaning up afterwards: incorrect spelling, hands with unnatural fingers, non-sensical devices/symbols etc.
- it only lets you manage AWS resources. And even if you’re not running multi-cloud, you’re bound to have a bunch of non-AWS resources like a DB vendor somewhere that you want to put on IaC as well
- it’s slow as molasses
- even if you feel HCL is bad, it will probably not be as bad as the huge swathes of YAML/JSON Cloudformation has you write
- despite what the console makes you believe, drift detection is practically non existent
- Investor driven companies that are waiting a 10x return on their money in 10 years at max or less. Or else.
- Microservices - where every one instead of collaborating on a single monolithic app is needlessly invested in microservice systems that result in software components that are "loosely coupled", have no transactional guarantees, can't go more than one caller down in depth thus can't be stacked on top of each other.
- The DevOps movement: Developers are also operators. So now you need such controls and products (kinder garden if you will) where developers can provision infrastructure for the microservices at will that they came up with (along with a cool name, could be some star wars, star, galaxy or greek mythology - anything goes, a peasant shouldn't be able to decipher the reference if any is the point)
For the one above, you definitely can build certain types of tools without tons of venture capital or at least command line tools can go that way even if they have a web interface.
For second, highly disputed and controversial - the jury is out. But I think most (and please pay attention to most) companies and business domains can do without microservices.