IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal
reuters.com
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IBM nearing a buyout deal for HashiCorp, source says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 - April 2024 (170 comments)
Hopefully this will create a new wave off innovation, and someone will create something to replace the monopoly on IaC that IBM now owns.
Most staff with no equity will leave quickly of course, so the invalidity of non compete will definitely help those souls.
HashiCorp had already been sold out since waaaay before this acquisition and I also don’t understand why their engineers are seen as “special”…
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.
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.
No, it is not. HN has both a "greybeard" audience that will cheer in "Go boring tech" posts and an "hipster" audience that is heavily start-up and disruption focused as GP was saying. When talking about IBM and acquisitions or similar topics, it's usually the second audience that speaks more.
That doesn't mean that some acquisition really kill the product, but you don't need to be as big and old as IBM to do that.
Fuck IBM.
It's funny to characterise people's beef with IBM as that they're boring, old, and stale when IBM are apparently allergic to anyone over 40.
Also their consultants have been some of the most weaponised incompetence laden, rude, and entitled idiots I've ever had the sincere displeasure to deal with.
IBM are an embarrassment to their own legacy imo.
I was more so commenting on the HN hate for the technology/products aspect. IBM has accomplished FAR more than hashicorp and everyone here acts like they were gods gift to software.
I expect, like RedHat, that the Hashicorp acquisition will result in a lot of startups that do not need enterprise-grade products shifting away from “anything Hashicorp offers that needs to charge money for Hashicorp to stay revenue-positive” and towards “any and all free alternatives that lower the opex of a business”, along with derogatory comments about IBM predictably assigning a non-$0 price for Hashicorp’s future work output.
* IBM had little to do with Red Hat's maneuvers around CentOS (I worked at Red Hat for several years and still have friends there, and nothing anybody there said publicly about CentOS in 2020 or 2023 was materially different from things people there were saying about it internally in 2012). Some people have tried to blame IBM for a general culture shift but as far as I've seen, every bit of the CentOS debacle was laid squarely at the feet of Red Hat staff by most in this industry -- as it should have been, since most of those involved were employed there well before IBM bought the company.
IBM's reputation as an aging dinosaur was well-earned long before it bought Red Hat, and continues to be earned outside it. That earned reputation was why they bought RHT in the first place: IBM Cloud market share was (and still is) declining and they wanted a jumpstart in both revenue and engineering credibility from OpenShift in particular.
I had been wondering who would buy HCP, I sort of figured it was either going to be AWS, Google, or Azure and then I figured the other vendor were going to have support removed (maybe gradually, maybe not.)
Also, IBM has been extremely ageist in their "layoff" policies. They also have declined in quality by outsourcing to low cost/low skill areas.
Self selection, to be sure, but their beefs were mostly about the crushing bureaucracy that was imposed on what was supposed to be a nimble type domain; (network) security is, after all, mostly leapfrog with the black hats.
I will not be taking questions ;-)
- it uses some form of consensus algorithm between all nodes that somehow manages to randomly get the whole cluster into a non working state by simply existing, requiring manual reboots
- Patches randomly introduce new features, often times with breaking changes to current behaviour
- Patches tend to break random different things and even the patches for those patches often don't work
- For some reason the process how to apply updates randomly changes between every couple of patches, making automation all but impossible
- the support doesn't know how $PRODUCT works, which leads to us explaining to them how it actually does things
- It is ridiculously expensive, both in hardware and licensing costs
All of this has been going on for years without any signs of improvement for now, to the point that $COMPANY now avoids IBM if at all possible
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.
This is not a pay day for many people. Anybody who got a pay day were those that could liquidate in the IPO.
Smaller and bigger percentages will be different but that's retirement money for hundreds and hundreds unless you pretend to live in very high CoL area. Also, most of them will likely have to keep working thereyears before cashing out some other millions likely.
There are many many people who made a loss on this, even before the acquisition announcement.
Also I think your ownership % is way off. There's a pretty small group of people, most of them the earliest employees + execs, who would have got out with $10M. HashiCorp currently has thousands of employees and would have churned through thousands more over the years.
IPO price was $35.
IPO day and you get 1000 RSUs unlocked/vested. Share price is $80. You made 80k gains. For simplicity let's say you owed 40K in taxes.
One of two things happens:
- Hasihcorp auto sells to cover and you get 500 less shares. - You need to pay your taxes on your own and earmark 40K.
Let's pick the easy one: If Hashicorp sold for you that day you are now sitting on 500 shares with a cost basis of $80.
Let's go to today, IBM buys and the person held. 500 shares are now were $35 so the value is $17,500.
You cash out -- getting 17,500 in your account, and a capital loss of $22,500.
Sure, 17K isn't as cool as 40K, but the person still "made money" just _less_. You make it sound like this person is now "underwater" because they had a capital loss.
=====
And kids at home, this is why you sell some/all of your RSUs as you get them. No one company should be more than 15% of your portfolio. Even the one you work at.
_A lot_ of people ended up with a loss.
The problem occurs when 22% isn’t enough, which is often the case.
People got RSUs. They owed tax on said RSUs. The tax cannot be higher than the value of the RSU at the time of vest.
If people did not have enough cash to pay their tax bill, and did not sell enough RSUs to get cash to pay said tax bill, then yes, I can see those people "with a loss" because they had a "surprise" tax bill, RSUs price went down and a cash problem now. Is this what you mean happened?
They shouldn't have had to "sell everything" -- at most like 50%.
I'm arguing with you here because this stuff is complex, and many people shy away from trying to understand it, and that's a huge disservice for those in our industry.
For anyone reading along -- It's as simple as this: understand the tax implications of the assets you own, pay your taxes.
In Australia we were granted options, which ordinarily are taxed at time of exercise. Lots of people were surprised to discover, almost a full year after the IPO, that those options were also subject to a tax deferral scheme and any tax already paid at exercise wasn't sufficient. The actual taxable amount determined by HashiCorp and the ATO was the $80 IPO price. If you sold the full amount you were entitled to (10% of your vested holdings) at the IPO you were probably fine. If you sold nothing, because you thought you had already paid the required taxes, by the time you received the tax statement the value of your stock would have been less than what you owed in taxes.
> No one company should be more than 15% of your portfolio. Even the one you work at.
... Barely any employees could have that much stock. There's 2200 employees from the most recent data I see. Even if the outstanding shares were 100% employee owned, a uniform allocation would at best see a 0.045% between them all. Obviously, the shares are not uniformly distributed across employees, nor is hashicorp 100% employee owned.
First of all your percentage of ownership is unrealistic. I joined in November 2019 and got a grant of a few thousand RSUs that fully vested before I left, and that I still have most of, plus I bought some shares in a few rounds of our ESPP when that became available -- as of today I have just under 5,000 shares. HashiCorp has nearly 200 million shares issued, so I own a hair over .0025% of the company. Really early employees got relatively big blocks of options but nobody I knew well there, even employees there long enough to be in that category (and there were very few of them still around by December 2021), was looking at "fuck-you money" just from the IPO.
Second, the current price isn't the whole story for employees. I had RSUs because of when I joined so the story might have been different for earlier employees who had options, but I don't think it differs in ways that matter for this discussion. As background for others:
* On IPO day in December 2021, 10% of our vested RSUs were "unlocked" -- a bit of an unusual deal where we could sell those shares immediately (or at any later time). Note "vested" there -- if you had joined the day before the IPO and not vested any RSUs yet, nothing unlocked for you. (Most of the time, as I understand it, you don't have any unlocked shares as an employee when your company IPOs -- you get to watch the stock price do whatever it does, usually go down a lot, for six months to a year.) * At a later date, if some criteria were met (which were both a report of quarterly earnings coming out and some specific financial metrics I forget), an additional tranche of vested shares (I think an additional 15%) unlocked -- I believe this was targeted at June 2022 and did happen on schedule. * After 1 year, everything vested unlocked.
At the moment of the IPO the price was $80, but it initially climbed into the $90's pretty fast. At one point, during intraday trading, it actually (very briefly) broke just above $100.
So, if you were aware ahead of time that the normal trajectory of stock post-IPO is down, and if you put in the right kind and size of limit orders, and if you were lucky enough to not overestimate the limit and end up not selling anything at all, then you could sell enough shares while it was up to cover the taxes on all of it and potentially make a little money over that. I was that lucky, and managed to hit all of those conditions while selling almost all of my unlocked shares (I even managed to sell a small block of shares at $100), plus my entire first post-IPO vesting block, and ended up with enough to cover the taxes on the whole ball of already-vested shares, plus a few grand left over. Since then, I haven't sold any shares except for what was automatically sold at each of my RSU vesting events.
For RSUs not yet vested at the IPO, the IPO price didn't matter because they sold a tranche of each new vesting block at market price to cover the taxes on them when they vested -- you could end up owing additional taxes but only, as I understand it, if the share price rose between vesting and sale of the remaining shares in the block, so you would inherently have the funds to pay the taxes on the difference. (And if the price fell in that time, you could correspondingly claim a loss to reduce your taxes owed.)
There were a fair number of people who held onto all their shares till it was way down, though, and had to sell a lot to cover their tax bill in early 2022 -- I think if you waited that long you had to sell pretty much all your unlocked shares because the price was well down by tax time (it bottomed out under $30 in early March 2022, then rose for awhile till it was back up over $55 right before tax day, so again, if you were lucky and bet on the timing right, you didn't end up too bad off, but waiting till the day before April 15 was not something I bet a lot of people felt comfortable doing while they were watching the price slide below $50 in late February). I even warned one of the sales reps I worked with, while the price was still up, about the big tax bill he should prepare for, and he was certain I was wrong and that he would only be taxed when he sold, and only on the sale price. (He was of course wrong, but I tried...)
The June unlock was pretty much irrelevant for me because by that point the share price was down under $30 -- it spent the whole month of June after the first week under $35. The highest it went between June 30, 2022 and today, was $44.34. The entire last year it's only made it above $35 on three days, and only closed above $35 on one of them. I figured long-term the company was likely to eventually either become profitable, or get bought, and in either case the price would bump back up.
I was thinking about cutting my losses and cashing out entirely when it dropped below $30 after the June layoffs, and again in November when it was below $20, and then yet again when I left the company in January of this year, but the analyst consensus seemed to be around $32-34 through all of that so I held on -- kinda glad I did now instead of selling at the bottom.
When they show the service awards they don’t even cover 5 years because they don’t have all day.
If it was so bad then you wouldn’t see engineers with 10, 15, or 20 years experience staying there. They already got their money from the IBM purchase so if it were bad then they would leave.
Oh but they don’t innovate anymore.
Summit is coming. Let’s see what gets announced and then a live demo.
Every big, old, stagnant company is full of lifers who won’t move on for any number of reasons. The pay is good enough, at least it’s stable, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t, yada yada yada. There are people in my life who work in jobs like that. They will openly admit that it sucks, but they are risk averse due to a combination of personality and family circumstances, so they stick it out. Their situation sucks, and they assume everything else sucks too. And often, because they’ve only worked in one place so long, they have a hard time finding other opportunities due to a combination of overly narrow experience and ageism.
The movie Office Space is about exactly the sort of company that is filled with lifers who hate their jobs but stay on the path of least resistance.
(I know absolutely nothing about working at Red Hat, so I’m not trying to make a specific claim about them. But I’ve known people in this situation at IBM and other companies that are too big for their own good.)
I too know several lifers at IBM. One thing I've realized is that staying loyal to a company over several years won't save you from ageism.
Your best defense against ageism may be to save more than 50% of your tech income for about 20 years, then move into management and build empires until the music stops.
> Oh but they don’t innovate anymore.
Before IBM purchase: travel to clients, build and/or fix their stuff, recommend improvements
After IBM purchase: travel to clients, build and/or fix their stuff, recommend improvements
At least on my side of the aisle I haven't noticed any notable changes in my day to day work for Red Hat. IBM has been very light touch on our consulting services.
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.
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.
But I had a similar experience like yours with PHP, I just couldn't get into it.
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.
Code generation in Golang is something I've found removed a lot of boilerplate.
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.
I think the reason people find go a bit annoying with the error condition is because go actually treats errors as a primary thought, not an after thought like Python, Java.
My preference is a language like Elixir where most methods have an error-code returning version and a ! version that might raise an exception. Then you (the programmer) can choose what you need. If you're writing a controller method that is for production important code, use explicit. If you're writing tests and just want to catch and handle any exception and log it, use exceptions. Or whatever makes the most sense in each situation.
try {
maybeError := FunctionThrowingValueError()
} catch (ValueError e) {
// do stuff
}
To each their own, it's not something I really worry about.
I agree on the logging point but my experience was the explicit error handling and with good test coverage meant we rarely got into situations were we had non-deterministic situation were we relied extensively on logging to resolve. But we also went through several iterations of tuning how we logged errors. It's definitely a rough edge in what is readily available in the language.
This sound a lot of like Apple user arguments about iPhone 1 missing copy & paste over a decade ago.
I am very pedantic about checking responses for errors, but from my experience when working with a team and existing project I see that people notoriously forget to check the result. TBH it is a pain to essentially repeating the boilerplate `if err !=nil ...`.
What's worse is that even documentation skips checks. For example `Close()` method. It's almost always returning error, but I almost never seen anyone check it.
The reason for it, is if you want to use `defer` (which most people do) you would end up with very ugly code.
The other alternative would be to then making sure you place (and properly handle error) close in multiple places (but then you risk of missing a place).
And other solution would be using `goto` in similar way as it is used in Linux Kernel, but there are people who have big problem with it. I had a boss who religiously was against goto (who did not seem to understand Dijkstra's argument), and asked me to remove it even though it made the code more readable.
Standard go error handling maximises for locality. You don't see many "long range" effects where you have to go and read the rest of the code to understand what's going to happen. Ideally everything you need is in the diff in front of you.
Stuff like defer() schedules de-alloc "near" to where things get allocated, you don't have to think about conditionals. If an MR touches only part of a large function you don't have to read the whole thing and understand the control flow.
The relative lack of abstraction limits the "infrastructure" / DSLs that ICs can create which renders code impenetrable to an outside reader. In a lot of C++ codebases you basically can't read an MR without digging into half the program because what looks like a for loop is calling down into a custom iterator, or someone has created a custom allocator or _something_ that means code which looks simple has surprising behaviour.
A partial solution for that problem is to have a LOT of tests, but it manifests in other ways, e.g. figuring out the runtime complexity of a random snippet of C++ can be surprisingly hard without reading a lot of the program.
I personally find these things make go MRs somewhat easier to review than in other languages. IMHO people complaining "it's more annoying to write" (lacking stronger abstractions available in many other languages) are correct but that's not the whole story.
P.S: For Close(), you're right that most examples skip checking the error and maybe it would be better if they didn't. It only costs a few lines to have a function that takes anything Closable and logs an error (usually not much else you can do) but people like to skip that in examples.
type Closable interface {
Close() error
}
func checkedClose(c Closable, resourceName string) {
if err := c.Close(); err != nil {
log.Printf("failed to close %s: %v", resourceName, err)
}
}> Standard go error handling maximises for locality. You don't see many "long range" effects where you have to go and read the rest of the code to understand what's going to happen. Ideally everything you need is in the diff in front of you.
I'm assuming you're comparing to exceptions.
I don't know about that. I think this relies on discipline of the software engineer. I can see for example someone who is strict and only uses exceptions on failures and returns normal responses during usual operation.
With Go you can use errors.Is and errors.As which take away that locality. Or what's worse, you could have someone actually react based on the string of the error message (although with some packages, this might be the only way).
I still see your point though, but I also think Rust implemented what Go was trying to do.
You get a Result type, which you can either match to get the data and check the error, you can also pass it downward (yes, this will take away that locality, but then compiler will warn you if you have a new unhanded error downstream), or you can chose to unwrap without checking error, which will trigger panic on error.
Re: Close() errors yeah most times you would be better off writing the code in place if you really need to handle them. You can make a little helper if you find yourself repeating the same dance a lot. Usually there's not much you can do about close errors though.
Sounds like the problem you have with the error checking relates more to development practice of colleagues than the language.
We used defer frequently. Never considered it ugly.
'goto' (hypothesising here as not used it) and use of exception handling that is expected to be handled at edge of boundary points in codebase can be elegant but does need careful thought and design is my experience. Can hide all sorts of issues, lead to a lot of spurious error handling for those that don't understand the intent. That's the biggest issue I have with implicit (magical) error handling - too many people do it poorly.
That said, in practice I see it following a similar philosophy to java checked exceptions, just with worse semantics.
Personally, I don't like high-boilerplate languages because they train me to start glossing over code, and it's harder for me to keep context when faced with a ton of boilerplate.
I don't hate go. I don't love it either. It's really good at a few things (static binaries, concurrency, backwards and forwards compatibility). I hate the lack of a fully-fleshed out standard library, the package management system is still a bit wonky (although much improved), and a few other aesthetic or minor gripes.
That said there's no language I really love, save maybe kotlin, which has the advantage of the superb java standard library, without all the structural dogma that used to (or still does) plague the language (OOO only, one public class per file, you need to make an anonymous interface to pass around functions, oh wait now we have a streaming API but its super wonky with almost c++ like compilation error messages, hey null pointers are a great idea right oh wait no okay just toss some lombok annotations everywhere).
End of the day though a lot of talented people are golang first and sometimes you just gotta go where the industry does regardless of personal preference. There's a reason scientists are still using FORTRAN after all these years, and why so much heavy math is done in python of all things (yeah yeah I know Cython is a thing and end of the day numpy etc abstract a lot of it out of the way, but a built in csv and json module combined with the super easy syntax made it sticky for data scientists for a reason)
Which kind of proves my point. Even Google struggled to write clean, idiomatic Go.
> I am not used to writing code where 2/3 of it is "if err" statements.
Access forbidden? Log a warning and show a 403 page. Is is JSON? Then return JSON.
Exception-handling in general is a pretty small part of most applications. In Go, MOST of the application is error-handling, often just duplicate code that is a nightmare to maintain. I just don't get why people insist it's somehow better, after we "evolved" from the brute-force way.
But If you are coming from java I can understand the single error handling block is more comfortable, but coming from JavaScript/Typescript it's much more easy to check if err != nil, than to debug errors I forgot to handle, during runtime.
If you are looking at OpenAPI in Golang I can recommend having a look at https://goa.design/. It's a DSL that generates OpenAPI specs and provides an implementation of the endpoints described. Can also generate gRPC from the same definitions.
We found this removed the need to write almost all of the API layer and a lot of the associated validation. We found the generated code including the server element to be production ready from the get go.
For that size of codebase I'd have thought code structure and modularisation would be more important than language choice.
Not a gopher by any stretch, but to my way of thinking code generation is literally boilerplate, that's why its generated. Or does Go have some metaprogramming facilities I'm unaware of?
So unrelated to code generated, if that makes sense. The generated code I'm sure had lots of boilerplate, it's just not code we needed to consider when developing.
I find it very hard to write expressive, easy to read code and more often than not I see people using massive switch-case statements and other, hard to maintain patterns instead of abstracting away things because it's so painful to create abstractions. (The Terraform/OpenTofu codebase is absolutely guilty of this btw, there is a reason why it's over 300k lines of code. There is a lot of procedural code in there with plenty of hidden global scope, so getting anything implemented that touches multiple parts typically requires a lot of contortions.)
It's not a bad language by any stretch, but there are things it is good at and things it is not really suited for.
[1]: [link redacted]
Both slices start out having the same underlying (bigger) array -so appending to one slice can affect the other one.
In the "bonus" part, though, the appends outgrew the original array, so new underlying arrays were allocated (i.e. the slices stopped sharing the same backing array).
Thanks for the heads-up, janosdebugs :)
So, when you slice a slice, if you perform an array operation like “append” while there is existing capacity, it will use that array space for the new value.
When the sliced value is assigned to another variable, it’s not a pointer that’s copied, it’s a new slice value (with the old length). So, this new value thinks it has capacity to overwrite that last array value - and it does.
So, that also overwrites the other slice’s last value.
If you append again, though, you get a (new) expanded array. It’s easier to see with more variables as demonstrated here: https://go.dev/play/p/AZR5E5ALnLR
(Sorry for formatting issues in that link, on phone)
Check out this post for more details: https://go.dev/blog/slices-intro
(In contrast to languages like Haskell and Clojure, which are simple in most of the ways that matter.)
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].
We're just starting to implement it and we've only heard good things about 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).
> 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
Not used it for about 5 years and I think they got bought by VMWare IIRC. The only downside is that Ansible won the mindshare so you're gonna be more on your own when it comes to writing esoteric formulas.
Interesting that folks are still using it, though I'm not sure of the market share.
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.
Disappointing to hear about this, Hashicorp was an amazing company. C’est la vie…
My shopping list during those years was NPM, Deis, Hashi and BitBalloon (now Netlify). These days: I generally think startups should do more M&A!
Kubernetes was the chasm. Owning the computing platform is the core of utilizing Vault and integrating it.
The primary issue was that there was never a "One Click" way to create an environment using Vagarent, Packer, Nomad, Vault, Waypoint, and Boundry for a local developer-to-prod setup. Because of this, everyone built bespoke, and each component was independently debated and selected. They could have standardized a pipeline and allowed new companies to get off the ground quickly. Existing companies could still pick and choose their pieces. On both, you sell support contracts.
I hope they do well at IBM. Their cloud services' strategy is creating a holistic platform. So, there is still a chance Hashi products will get the integration they deserve.
Fast forward several years, I saw a little while ago that they don't recommend the only method of vault running on EC2, fully support kubernetes, and I saw several of my ideas/feedback listed almost verbatim in the documentation I saw (note, I am not accusing them of plagiarism - these were very obvious complaints that I'm sure I wasn't the only one raising after a while).
It always surprised me how these conversations went. "Well we don't really recommend kubernetes so we won't support (feature)."
Me: "Well the majority of your customers will want to use it this way, so....."
Just was a very frustrating process, and a frustrating product - I love what it does, but there are an unbelievable amount of footguns laden in the enterprise version, not to mention it has a way of worming itself irrevocably into your infrastructure, and due to extremely weird/obfuscated pricing models I'm fairly certain people are waking up to surprise bills nowadays. They also rug pulled some OSS features, particularly MFA login, which kind of pissed me off. The product (in my view) is pretty much worthless to a company without that.
My feeling is that for the average company operating in a (single) cloud, there’s no reason to use vault when you can just used AWS Secret Manager or the equivalent in azure or GCE and not have to worry about fucking Etcd quorums and so forth. Just make simple api calls with the IAM creds you already have.
However, strong agree on using your home cloud's service.
We used Vault with Heroku and were happy.
HCP hosted Vault starts at ~$1200/month, you'd have to use a metric shit ton of secrets in AWS or GCP to come close to that amount. Yes Vault does more than just secrets, but claiming anything HC sells as reasonably priced is a reach.
We were running about $12/mo in aws secrets with no caching and no usage outside our aws services. I taught the team how to cache the secrets in the lambda function and it dropped to a buck a month or less.
If they killed off the starter package then you are right, there are only outrageous options and HCP would not be worth considering for small orgs.
The reasoning is basically that there are some security and isolation guarantees you don't get in Kubernetes that you do get on bare metal or (to a somewhat lesser extent) in VMs.
In particular for Kubernetes, Vault wants to run as a non-root user and set the IPC_LOCK capability when it starts to prevent its memory from being swapped to disk. While in Docker you can directly enable this by adding capabilities when you launch the container, Kubernetes has an issue because of the way it handles non-root container users specified in a pod manifest, detailed in a (long-dormant) KEP: https://github.com/kubernetes/enhancements/blob/master/keps/... (tl;dr: Kubernetes runs the container process as root, with the specified capabilities added, but then switches it to the non-root UID, which causes the explicitly-added capabilities to be dropped).
You can work around this by rebuilding the container and setting the capability directly on the binary, but the upstream build of the binary and the one in the container image don't come with that set (because the user should set it at runtime if running the container image directly, and the systemd unit sets it via systemd if running as a systemd service, so there's no need to do that except for working around Kubernetes' ambient-capability issue).
> It always surprised me how these conversations went. "Well we don't really recommend kubernetes so we won't support (feature)."
> Me: "Well the majority of your customers will want to use it this way, so....."
Ha, I had a similar conversation internally in the early days of Boundary. Something like "Hey, if I run Boundary in Kubernetes, X won't work because Y." And the initial response was "Why would you want to run Boundary in Kubernetes?" The Boundary team came around pretty quick though, and Kubernetes ended up being one of the flagship use cases for it.
There's probably an alternate reality where something like HashiStack became this generation's vSphere, and HashiCorp stayed independent and profitable.
"Linux Foundation joins IBM to accelerate the mission of multi-cloud automation and bring the products to a broader audience of users and customers." ;)
So yeah, one can always fork the last available version, if it then survives to the extent that actually matters beyond hobby coding is seldom the case.
How many Open Solaris forks are actually relevant outside the company that owns those forks?
Also IBM, Microsoft, Oracle,.... and others that HN loves to hate are already members.
Regardless of various things that have happened, or things that could have been, the company has pushed the envelope with some absolute bangers and we are all better for it, directly or indirectly.
Regardless of what the general opinion is of Hashicorp’s future post-IBM, they made an impact and that should be celebrated, not decried or sorrowed over for lack of a perceived picture perfect ending.
Such is life.
1. https://tomforb.es/blog/dell-system-detect-rce-vulnerability...
Confirming what everybody knows, IBM views HashiCorp's products as Terraform, Vault, and some other shit.
I'm sure you've broken many promises to your younger self.
1. Easier access to capital markets and liquidity in general 2. Marketing/publicity provided by equity research coverage 3. Legitimacy / transparency and trust building for customers (public filings, outsides can gauge health of business) 4. Thanks to number 3, companies have an easier time getting larger corporations as clients or partners
Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t make it bad
Also, what "democratic access" did people get? The ability to buy at $80 a share and then eventually sell it at $30?
Does anyone really believe this kind of stuff anymore?
Capitalism is not a religion, there is no belief involved.
It's a mistake if you care about the long term health of a company. But... why should you?
Hashicorp had a great run, and contributed a lot of great open source products over the years. Today, their products have large user bases and healthy forks seem likely. The founders and early employees cash out, and it's a win for everybody involved.
Nothing lasts forever.
Edit: found something: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-sou...
This was a major blow to the participating open source community. The license bow used is also vague and untested.
This encouraged at least 4 companies to launch terraform-cloud-like products, and rather than compete and provide better service, Hashicorp responded by saying "take it or leave it, internet!" and they closed the open-source license on the interpreter (BUSL)... At my previous company we were driven away from terraform cloud and into the arms of env0 ... when it often takes 10 minutes for an execution to begin and you have no other executions in progress you realize that the terraform cloud SAAS product is just a total joke...
Those who take this to the next level by offering Enterprise like features such as change window and approval gates from Jira/ServiceNow will land whales.
Before the license change, another project (Pulumi) built something that was basically a thin wrapper on Terraform and some convenient functionality. They claim they tried to submit PRs upstream. Hashicorp loudly complained about organizations that were using their source without making contributions back when they changed to BUSL. I wasn't close enough to be aware of details there, but maybe there were other groups (I can think of Terragrunt, too, but I'm not sure they're included in the parties Hashicorp was complaining about. Terragrunt did side with OpenTOFU after the license change, though). This also means cloud providers can't stand up their own Terraform cloud service product as it could interfere with the BUSL license.
When the license was updated to BUSL, several contributors forked the last MPL-licensed version into OpenTF, then renamed to OpenTOFU. Some say that Hashicorp should have gone full closed-source to own their decision. I think they knew they were benefitting greatly from several large corporations' contributions for provider-specific configuration templates and types.
Then, earlier this month (two weeks ago?) Hashicorp brought a case against OpenTOFU claiming they have stolen code from the BUSL-licensed version, with OpenTOFU outright denying the claim. We'll see how that shakes out, but it shows that Hashicorp wasn't merely concerned about copyright & business/naming concerns (a big part of why other BUSL-licensed projects chose the license). I don't know if the upcoming M&A had anything to do with their license decision but I kind of doubt it? Maybe others here have more context or are more familiar with matters than I am.
I'm sure IBM Cloud's Vault offering was part of the decision, but from where I was sitting, it didn't look like the reason or even the primary reason.
I'm really wondering who is kidding who here. Is it IBM or Hashi?
So all in all I think another big win for open source even if little indirectly.
Is that an insane premium or what?
The amount may have been negotiated prior to this month's downturn, which Hashicorp was hit pretty hard by (they had about a 10% fall based on what I'm seeing).
April-August of last year, HashiCorp was regularly above a 20% premium over Monday's close. Many investors might think it would get back there without a merger - and it had been higher. IBM is offering $35/share which is close to the $36.39 52-week high. In some cases, investors are delusional and just bought in at the peak. In other cases, a company's shares have been under-valued and the company shouldn't sell itself cheaply.
I don't think one can really have a fixed percent premium for acquisitions because it really depends. Is their stock trading at a bargain price right now? Maybe people who believe in the stock own a lot of the company and don't have more capital to buy shares at the price they consider to be a bargain - but would vote against selling at that bargain price even if they can't buy more. They're confident other investors will come around. An acquiring company wants to make an offer they think will be accepted by the majority of investors, but also doesn't want to pay more than it has to. If the stock has been down and investors think it's a sinking ship, they don't have to offer much of a premium. If the stock is up a ton and investors sense a bubble, maybe they don't have to offer much of a premium. If the stock has been battered, but a lot of shareholders believe in it, then they might need to offer more of a premium.
https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/datapower-gateway/10.5.x?topic=2...
100% of the companies I worked for over the last 6 years all used Terraform, there really wasn't anything else out there, and though there were complaints, it generally worked.
It really provided a lot of value to us, and we definitely would have been willing to pay.
Though every time we asked, we wanted commitment to update the AWS/GCP providers in a timely fashion for new features, and they would never commit and tried to shove some hosted terraform service down our throats, which we would never agree to anyway due to IP/security concerns.
That way, the profit beneficiaries bear the brunt of the development/maintenance costs.
Now we know why!
There will be nothing worth of using pretty soon as we will all move to the next big foss thing.
I know if nobody else does anything I will do something myself, personally.
I love Kubernetes, however I feel like things like Nomad and Mesos have a space to exist in as well. Nomad especially holds a special place in my tech-heart. :)
Same. I'm not a fan of the recent licensing changes and probably won't use it for any new installations, but Nomad enabled me to be an entire ops team AND do all my other startupy engineer duties as well with minimal babysitting. It really just works, and works fantastically for what it is. Nomad is like the perfect mix of functional and easy to manage.
There doesn't seem to be enough forces to create a MPL fork but at the same time we have a gap between "Docker Compose is enough" and running Kubernetes. Because there are many situations where going Kubernetes (or even lighter k0s, k3s type setups) does not make any sense.
My guess is no organisation which can afford to dedicate resources to contribute or create a fork need Nomad. So we end up with a big gap in the ecosystem.
Side note, in the 12 years that I used Red Hat at work, we used the support 2 times, and both times they forwarded some articles that we had already found and implemented. However, enterprise always demands some support contract behind critical systems to blame in case of disaster.
Honestly, who knows what would have happened if Red Hat was left as an independent entity, but we do know for sure that they did make the changes after the acquisition.
>The software now branded as CentOS is basically Fedora
CentOS Stream (what replaced CentOS) is vastly more similar to CentOS than Fedora.
It's CentOS with rolling patches instead of bundling those same patches into minor releases every 6 months. Only the release model is different from RHEL / CentOS, otherwise it's built the same and holds to the same policies in terms of testing, how updates are handled and compatibility.
Fedora on the other hand is very, very different. Packages are built with different flags, different defaults (e.g. filesystems), very different package versions, a different package update policy (even within one major release Fedora is much more aggressive than CentOS Stream / RHEL / CentOS), etc.
I understand that not having an near-exact replica of RHEL supported for 10 years was very convenient and the way the EOL was announced, and the timelines, sucked massively. But CentOS Stream is suitable for a large number of the use cases where CentOS was used previously, it is not "basically Fedora". It's more like 98% RHEL-like wheras Fedora is doing something else entirely.
5 years is less than 10, but it's a lot less different than 10 vs 1
But I could be totally off-base.
technically, couldn't have IBM have hired Mitch when he was still doing vagrant ?
and put him in a closet somewhere. Given how Mitch, cranks out products -- could technically been cheaper than 6.4bn but then again IBM ain't hurting for cash.
That sort of vision/foresight seems fairly rare, I'd think particularly rare at an IBM type place.
I always have mixed feelings when a software company like this grabs their bag and leaves the community that helped build them, high and dry; good for them but still bad for everyone else nine out of ten times.
Be "interesting" to see what happens to the recently-renamed Terraform Cloud (now Hashicorp Cloud Platform Terraform :eyeroll:)
Edited to add: I'm guessing the feature I want added to the terraform language server is never going to happen now. Terraform's language server doesn't support registries inside Terraform Cloud, it doesn't know how to read the token in your terraformrc. bleh.
God, please no. The worst thing about all these tools is the terrible formats they keep choosing.
Given the directions we’ve (“cutting edge” programmers and server ops folks) chosen to go instead, leaving XML behind was a big mistake.
I’d prefer something better, but yaml and json are so terrible that going back to xml would be an improvement.
What are your reasons for disliking JSON?
That’d be my argument specifically against using it to communicate between pieces of software—at least if you’re hand-writing it there’s the excuse that it’s kinda, sorta easy to read and write (at least, people say that—IMO it’s only true for tiny, trivial examples, but that may be a matter of taste)
My take on it as a hand-written config/data language is that it’s simply absurd. JSON-schema is terribly unwieldy, but also the lingua franca, so if you want to keep your sanity you write something better to define your data structures (probably in some actual programming language) and generate JSON schema to share structure definitions among readers. Oh my—why?
I meant that you'd write in a human centric language that would then be translated to JSON. Not editing JSON directly.
Hardly - it's a hack as a data-only subset of JavaScript, as a sibling comment mentions.
It has no support for comments (even though JavaScript does). No support for optimal trailing commas. No integers. No enums.
I meant that you'd write in a human centric language that would then be translated to JSON. Not editing JSON directly.
It goes like this:
- XML was created to allow humans to write human-friendly data encoding (AKA "markup") that had lots of features they wanted programs to take advantage of.
- It turned out the format they chose was great for the machines, but really annoying for humans.
- They refused to change the format for humans, so humans got sick of it, and decided the problem was it was "too complicated" (as opposed to merely "too clunky").
- So they created some other formats, which weren't in any way better, but were simpler, so they could ignore the fact that they made the formats too clunky.
- Some formats' designers were opinionated, and decided things like "comments are an anti-pattern in a data format", so they took those features out.
- So now humans could manage the formats better. But they still wanted programs to take advantage of useful features - like multiple data types. So they implemented multiple data types in the formats.
- But the humans forgot that humans are still pretty dumb, and that most people never read specifications. So the users of the new format would incorrectly use the format, and run into the different data types accidentally (like true/false or null in JSON, or "The Norway Problem" in YAML), and claim the problem was the format, and not their own ignorance of it. (isn't the human ego amazing?)
- So the humans, not having learned from history, invented yet more data formats, with even fewer features, so that they would not continue to screw up the things they themselves invented. And so you get things like "restricted yaml" or "toml" (which is basically an .ini file, a format from 50 years before).
A data format that allows comments is called a "configuration file", and is supposed to be primarily read and written by humans, and requires a machine to implement a parser for it. Those are not always easy to write, which is why most people today have chosen to use data formats rather than configuration formats. But that has the unintended consequence of humans not understanding that types in data formats are a thing.
Back in the day we wrote the configuration format for the human, and used data formats for machine<->machine communication. Some of those data formats were very easy for humans to read, but that was largely an accident of the fact that most programs had records so simple that we separated everything with newlines... not an engineering decision as much as a "hey, it's really easy to just read an entire data record as everything up to '\n'" thing.
Over time people have sort of become confused about what each format is and how it should be used, and what for. The data format churn (and constant griping) will continue, forever, because humans never learn their history.
Win win for IBM. They offer stability to their big corporate clients and they get to resell the work done by third parties. The BSL license is an obstacle to that because it means they have to reinvent wheels internally. Changing the license back means they can gut the R&D department at the price of a simple license change and focus instead on sales, support, and consulting.
IBM nearing a buyout deal for HashiCorp, source says - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 - April 2024 (170 comments)
Also, it's probably the time to archive my Vagrant Machines repository. I guess all HashiCorp tools will be rolling downhill for personal use.
Not a bad place to end up after automating class sign-up at UW!
In the past, IBM was a technology leader, and probably still has substantial talent excellent inhouse, but from what I'm hearing it has become less appreciative of its researchers and engineers: for instance, my IBM friends lost any patenting activity related bonuses already several years ago.
Also, the Watson debacle (trying to monetize the Watson brand and the (impressive) Watson Jeopardy challenge results by quickly acquiring a bunch of stuff, only to then sell it as "our Watson AI technology") didn't help bolster its reputation, but rather harmed it further.
Companies like IBM and HP should go back to the roots, value science and engineering, take on bold blue-sky projects (don't leave those only to Musk!), and lead by example. Perhaps this could happen, but only with an engineer-scientist at the top instead of professional managers or bean counters (I'm not attacking the perormance of any individual here as I have not been following recent leadership activities of either company recently).
It is unlikely, IMHO, that an acquired company can change the culture of the acquirer. The only time I've seen this happening was Nokia benefitting Microsoft's culture, but that's because they made Nokia's CEO Microsoft's CEO, which is not going to happen with any likelihood in IBM's case.
Next up, Canonical, though they’ve been tilting sideways without an acquisition to push them.
Accelerate! Multi-cloud! Automation!
For a lot of developers including me, I never think about IBM or HashiCorp (or Oracle, SAP, etc.) and it's hard to imagine why someone would want to use their software compared to something newer, friendlier, cheaper, and probably faster. Is it just relationships?
Just curious how customers are actually getting value from an IBM or a HashiCorp or an Oracle.
Vault for securely storing keys is also a convenient system component.
Both can be spun up in production without having to go through Hashicorp directly, but they also offer a service for managing the current state of the deployment (some aspects of the system are not queried at runtime and must be kept in a lock file of sorts, and coordinated with others doing any production changes). Some teams will coordinate using an S3 folder or some other ACL'd shared storage instead of relying on Hashicorp Cloud.
I find it's the closest thing to a public version of the service management tools I grew used to within Google, and it has been a driving force for the DevOps movement. I think something else could come along and do it better but it does seem like a lot of upkeep to retain parity with all the cloud services' products. I hope OpenTofu is successful, competition helps.
My favorite DevOps setup is my Raspberry Pi home server running Raspbian, love this thing - WiFi, touch screen so I can hold it like a mobile device or just set it down somewhere while it's serving several APIs, websites, etc. all the time including a local business in SF. Haven't stopped or restarted it in months.
I look at some of these big, old behemoths, and just don't get it. Take Oracle - when you really get into what they "do" it's like... oh... so, a database? Right now they offer clone services of the other cloud providers too, and some other things, but it's mostly just those huge consulting contracts. I just wonder how they get them (and at those rates) if not for relationships, it doesn't seem like their technology is particularly good.
Personally I run stuff like React sites on Vercel, backends on a mix of my Raspberry Pi and Heroku, and 1 thing still in GCP that I can't wait to port out of there. Still looking for a home for my LLMs. As an individual developer, I will probably embrace PaaS and convenience more and more with regards to DevOps, but yeah interesting to see where open-source Terraform goes - would be cool to see companies doing more customized infra internally instead of everyone using AWS.
Setting up a remote state in S3/Dynamo takes 5 minutes with a publicly available module and solves most of the problems TF cloud does.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110220214126/http://www-03.ibm...
IBM doesn't assert their will upon Red Hat anywhere near as strongly as HN seems to think they do and in particular the whole story about IBM killing CentOS is BS.
I know the decision makers in our shop spent quite a lot of time deciding between the two. Finally decided on bicep after a number of what has probably been the most boring workshops I’ve ever attended. I’m fairly certain they are very happy with that decision now though. Not so much because big blue is evil, but because now we’re only beholden to one evil (Microsoft) and not two.
I don’t actually think Microsoft or IBM are evil. They are just not ideal from an European enterprise perspective because they are subject to an increasing amount of anti-non-eu legalisation and national/internal security issues.
Waypoint and Boundary don't seem all that useful.
Vagrant has fallen by the wayside supplanted by Docker and K8S. Vagrant was the origin, but quickly went from FOSS to FOSS-washed when it reneged on VMware support as a premium-only, closed-source option.
IBM is indistinguishable from Progress and Broadcom... it buys things and milks them while they decline.
Microsoft just lacks taste and any sense of accountability for all of the vulnerabilities and exploit damage it has, and continues to, inflict on the world.
Disclaimer: I’m one of the founders.
Boeing acquiring McDonald Douglas is a classic example of this exact scenario: "McDonald Douglas bought Boeing with Boeings money."
Additionally, you don't need the full purchase price in cash to buy the company. You can do leveraged buyouts, etc.
Hopefully someone at HashiCorp: "Hell no, cash please"
Think every core IT infra of most of the developed world countries, most of the ebanking and core messaging infra of your large banks and insurance companies, plus billions per year in consulting services revenue.
Again, HN users are in a bubble, and HN users think that they’re very trendy.
HN users are trendy. If you didn't grow up in the 1990s or before though you may not remember just how picked on this type of crowd was. Now while we are never exactly the "in" crowd, we are respected, being a "nerd" or "geek" is now an acceptable thing. We have come a long way and that is enough trendy enough for us.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-releases-first-quarter-re...
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-closes-la...
I think they can find a few billions lying around, without having to turn the sofa cushions.
If you're a shipyard, an oil company, a bank, an automaker, etc. you still need software to manage things like inventory, employees, logistics, and similar, and you have zero expertise to do it in-house. They also have zero expertise to find a qualified vendor.
IBM is a safe bet.
That's a huge market.
If HashiCorp stuff is destined to die, something else will eventually rise to fill its niche if it's still valuable.
You can always count on technology to churn for no good reason.
To avoid sounding completely pessimestic: don't discount an IBM comeback either, for the same churning reasons.