Mitchell reflects as he departs HashiCorp
hashicorp.com
hashicorp.com
Many accomplishments and the ability to change an entire industry. One of a kind!
Can't wait to see what else you get up to.
Thank you for your work, it was great while it lasted!
ty, mitchellh!
I actually still have some projects with a Vagrant VM based on it that I have to move to docker compose or something.
I (selfishly) hope whatever is next is still hacker adjacent, bc your work has been a big inspiration to a lot of us. Best of luck to you!
You should check out the terminal he's been working on codenamed Ghostty [0].
You and Armon have truly shaped the world of infrastructure with your tools and ideas. Although we never met in person (I only had the pleasure to meet Armon so far) - we've interacted a couple of times through some PRs and I really like you as an engineer. It's incredible the value that you created over these 11 years - not only on the product side of things (Terraform and Vault are incredible!), but also with all of your Go packages. The amount of time your name pops up in my go.mod files is just impressive :)
You and Armon are incredible engineers and I'm so happy you built something as cool as Hashicorp! All the best with the next chapter of your life!
-Iridium
Thanks for all the amazing work thus far!
Vagrant: A tool for building and distributing virtual development environments (vagrantup.com) 129 points by mitchellh on March 8, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 28 comments
I still remember reading that post on HN. And subsequently Vagrant took off. Cant believe it is nearly 14 years! Thank You Mitchell for everything as I am (still) using Vagrant. First Child is always going to be a hectic job beyond comprehension. Hopefully you will have more free time to play with Zig and may be even Crystal once your child grows a little more. Best of Luck.
Edit: I guess HN momentarily went down due to this announcement on front page.
This feels like open source and community creation at its best. It's why GNU/Linux systems did what they did. A bunch of professors and hackers tried to clean-room recreate Unix but never finished the kernel. Meanwhile, some grad student made a kernel but no userspace. Then some entirely different teams put these together along with a package manager, installer, and remote filesystems users could fetch ISOs and packages from, and finally you've got a usable system that didn't require a beast the size of Microsoft to do everything in-house. None of them could have done it alone.
It also makes the events of the past year kind of poignant. I see a lot of commenters talking about HashiCorp needing the license change to capture the value of what they created and not allow other companies to siphon it off. But isn't that the point of civilization? We all stand on the shoulders of giants. We generally don't want the first person to come up with an idea and their direct descendants to be the only people who ever profit off of that idea. That's aristocracy. Mitchell is a billionaire, isn't he? None of Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, or Ian Murdoch ever became billionaires, but they weren't exactly starving in the street, either. Exactly how much value does a single person need to capture? It's the community we want to see thrive, isn't it? Not just our single company. Every employee of that company can work elsewhere if they need to and every investor has other investments. They aren't going to starve either if the company someday stops growing.
I get not wanting the Amazons and Googles of the world to take open source inputs and put them into proprietary sinkholes where further innovation gets stuck inside of a single company. But isn't that the point of the GPL? Anything they add they also have to give back. You don't need BUSL for that.
Being on almost the opposite end of the software design, I haven’t yet had a good place to apply the tools you’ve built, but I’ve heard many nice things about them from practically everyone, including direct competitors. That says it all.
Thank you for all you've created.
Sounds totally legit!
I always look to HashiCorp first when searching for tooling. Always something interesting coming out of that shop.
Thank you, @mitchellh !
But at the same time I don't really like some of the features are guarded behind paywalls...like Vault/Consul namespaces or multimaster deployment...and the price for those useful features are nefariously hostile for startups like us.
Nothing more.
He's honest about what he's passionate about. Hence why he went from running the company to stepping back to being an IC.
I've got a lot of respect for that.
Below is his personal website, for those who haven't read his posts.
Standards that they have set are still industry wide relevant. But you can see they are on a negative path.
It's a bit like Elasticsearch, I think—it's gotten big enough it won't be a quick death, but I don't see Hashi's products growing/dominating as much now as I did a couple years ago.
(As an aside, I'd like to thank Mitchell for his work over the years, Vagrant especially was huge in my infrastructure work, and Terraform was a great companion to Ansible and CloudFormation as we automated more and more stuff.)
(I'm hoping Mitchell is going to have an answer to that)
Or OpenTF if you want to same thing minus the licensing mess
I tried to understand what is it, how it works, what is it good for, but ... never managed to. It still has the same "build control planes without needing to write code" on its website. okay, it says "orchestrate applications and infrastructure". that's at least makes sense when the context is Terraform and Pulumi.
okay, in the quickstart the whole thing seems like code. but okay.
ah, so you can use k8s CRDs to define cloud stuff (like S3 buckets and GCP GCS buckets and whatnot), not bad, but super verbose.
Crossplane -> Same end result as Terraform but you use K8s resources in YAML to describe your infra.
I hope that helps. But I agree that the crossplane/upbound marketing is super confusing.
Yes, technically you can do that with Terraform but in my experience it doesn't work great for code deploys (which tend to have procedural steps)
Still happily using Vault for now, though.
You should switch to OpenBAO.
If I'm building product for on prem I'd prefer to use env vars or k8s secrets and let the customer integrate their preferred secrets manager. Also helpful when you run sales POCs where ease of getting to splash page really matters.
Building inside enterprise, I've never actually had to support multiple clouds for the same component but if it ever comes up and I have any sort of choice in the matter I would probably rather template 3 native secrets integrations than deal with the special circle of hell that is enterprise-managed Vault or CyberArk.
Also my vision of multi-cloud in large org hasn't been that a particular product/app or team was ever using multiple clouds. My experience is that large orgs like to have multi-cloud support because they grow by acquiring other companies regardless of which cloud vendor they are using so you just want to provide standards and templates for everyone. Obviously said templates will be usually cloud vendor specifics.
When you talk to Consul support engineers, they assume you're using kubernetes, and are confused if you tell them you're using Nomad, _a product that their company makes_.
There are online courses for free and paid courses (online and in person) so if they have the desire to learn, you won't be the only person.
It’s a different beast than the company Mitchell founded and that HN knew and loved, that’s all.
Btw. he published a great read on how they started Autodesk https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/
You'll see it in plenty of Reddit discussions as well. It just so happens that a good hunk of this site happen to work in the kind of environment that the acronym is used frequently so perhaps it's not entirely unreasonable to expect it to be well known.
I swear though, if you haven't been on Blind and you just visit it's like decoding another language with all the acronyms.
OOTL here. What happened?
Check online yourself. Disclaimer, I am the author of a similar tool: https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/
Well done to the Hashicorp team for getting to where they are now - by building something new and useful, and by fundamentally not being greedy.
From what I saw Mitchell let go of running the company and now that HashiCorp is not so cool anymore it's time to get out.
They should have thought about this a long, long time ago.
I feel for the smaller companies, but I feel for big companies that come in and plunder because of open license terms.
And Vault Enterprise could've been something I can justify to my EM to to ensure it continues to exist (and get namespaces and slow support as a bonus). But they asked way too much.
It also doesn't help they started prioritizing bugs almost solely based on support contracts, even trivial fixes you submit don't get merged for months to years.
They built products and thought everything else would just fall into place. And unfortunately it doesn't.
Employees gotta eat, I don't begrudge them trying to sell the software. But it seems like they went for the Lamborghini business model when maybe what the market was looking for was Honda.
IBM, would you choose to trust statements[1] posted from a throwaway account
Had not heard the IBM angle before and spent a few minutes digging.
The TACOS provided way more features at a sane price point. They were out-competed by their own cottage industry and the BSL was their weapon to solve it. Surprise, surprise it backfired.
I respect Mitchell for the competent programmer he is but as a founder, he should have stepped in and done something to right the ship before it got this bad.
Jokes aside, it's an end of an era. Mitchell has always been one of my role models both as an amazing engineer and a really decent, humble human being. I'm really looking forward to other amazing things he's going to build.
Great that Mitchell evaded that fate by getting out of the leadership before controversial moves by Hashicorp started occurring. His legacy will be untainted.
Best of luck in the future! I'm a nobody - but I was around in the packer days and wrote a post-processor and terraform provider for our vsphere back in the day. I don't think I'd be where I am now without those experiences. Thanks!
Someone else beat me to the punch on buying the website, but Mitchell’s clarity of purpose was profound.
Hashicorp seems to be doing alright to me. Don't look at the stock price.
I hope Hashicorp will manage to find its stride and not end up as some bullet point in a long "solutions" portfolio of some software conglomerate.
And thank you Mitchell for all the work. Can't wait to see what is coming next from you.
https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/366563095...
Their other offerings have very strong alternatives.
I use Terraform and will certainly consider going with OpenTofu in the next upgrade.
Only reason I've used them is because someone at work set it up and left.
He has stressed twice in the post that most of his life revolved around that company - Maybe it's time for that not to be anymore - simply put.
> The controversial worldviews such as multi-cloud that we founded this company on are now mainstream and broadly accepted.
Emm .. no. It is not mainstream. Multi-cloud may be forced choice for some regulated fintech, but no sane project will double the infra codebase just to get from "lock-in". I see no other benefits. And double the codebase is quadruple the bugs. This is main Terraform's sales pitch, and it has to die. IMHO.
If you’re doing it that way, you avoid most of those multicloud drawbacks because you’re using the full native functionality, not building abstraction layers or racking up technical debt by sticking with the lowest common denominator.
My bad, I did not define meaning of multi-cloud. I meant using AWS and GCP at the same time, doing mostly the same things, for redundancy and no lock-in.
Still I prefer native IaaC tools, it is simpler, faster and more reliable. I'm AWS guy, so Cloudformation for all things infra. It irks me when I see Terraform doing AWS infra. I jump in to rewrite it as first matter of business, lol
And chasing where the var value actually came from in TF drove me mad few times!
He means his product supports multiple clouds, through terraforms providers, for example.
Doing the same infra, across multiple clouds, is a different thing, it's not a Hashi thing.
Not sure about this. Here is what official site says:
"Provisioning infrastructure across multiple clouds increases fault tolerance, allowing for more graceful recovery from cloud provider outages."
To give you an analogy it would be like Firefox saying that they are "multi-OS" meaning that you can install Firefox if you have Windows and you can install Firefox if you have Linux. It doesn't mean that you must/should have Linux and Windows at the same time as a user.
Your analogy also does not demonstrate whatever it is you seem to think it does - Firefox is indeed multi-OS.
Disagree. The message says “fault tolerance”, meaning you deploy same things in different clouds. Which brings back to my original post - TF does not help with this, as jen20 said - very different resource models.
Isn't this cause you to pay twice the already expensive Egress fee ?
"Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) with a 56,1% increase in popularity is the fastest-growing language according to GitHub"
Fastest growing and "top" are not the same thing, but I have to assume that you know that @mitchellh. Embarrassed for you.
I think this is a case where the citation bears out the claim, and there's no need for Mitchell to feel embarrassment.
[1]: https://github.blog/2023-11-08-the-state-of-open-source-and-...