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Comment by vbernat | Hacker News Reader

It's odd to always say "Hashicorp, an IBM company". Looks like they want to assign blame.

I did try Pulumi a while back, but the compatibility with Terraform modules was not great, so I've switched to CDKTF, which can handle unmodified modules. Dunno if I'll switch back to Pulumi or just use OpenTofu directly.

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> It's odd to always say "Hashicorp, an IBM company". Looks like they want to assign blame.

All their branding does this now, including the HashiCorp logo on their website [0]. There's gotta be a name for this specific branding pattern, but I don't know it.

[0] https://www.hashicorp.com/en/blog/products/terraform

Metastatized branding

It’s endorsed branding. Basically when a parent company “endorses” its subsidiaries’ brands, but keep their own name (as opposed to renaming everything to IBM, like eg Google would do).

I was recently working for a company which got acquired by IBM and we had to do it too. It’s an IBM thing. I bet most people at HashiCorp hate it, at least that was the case for us.

Makes IBM look really bad. Do they also force people to bow when the CEO of IBM enters the room, and address them as sir or your highness?

They used to have their employees sign songs praising the company...

Granted, that was in the 1930s or something, but still.

I remember it being a part of the movie Pirates of Silicon Valley and thought it couldn’t be true. But apparently it was.

https://youtu.be/VyQEbLx6AEY?si=CwhqHQEdFGCsE33l

Wow, the truth is stranger than fiction.

I have absolutely nothing good to say about Pulumi. Stay far, far away.

Strange, I have a lot of good things to say about both it and Terraform.

Probably some specifics might be more useful there...

please expand on this, I am interested (for real!)

Why? I’ve had nothing but good experiences, but I don’t run it and the team that does is extremely competent

My experience with Pulumi is you can write bad pulumi code and good pulumi code and just like everything else, it's easy to end up in a codebase where one poor soul was tasked with writing it all and they didn't do the best job with it.

Please expand on your experiences, because I've had great luck with Pulumi at my company since October 2021. No engineer liked HCL, our demographic was engineers who were familiar with programming languages who wanted to self service basic infrastructure (AWS SecretsManager, IRSA roles, Databricks Service Principals, etc). We were pretty easily able to shim in a RunAtlantis inspired system that displayed previews that required explicit approval when a PR was raised, performed apply on merge to main, and ran drift checks periodically.

For me, the ideal is each team owns its own config/lifecycle mgmt, and does it in the language they wrote the rest of the system in.

Their stack builds a lot of abstractions on top of each other and this works only well as long as you don't deviate from the beaten path.

One example:

You can't really build custom TS providers for AWS resources.

Why?

Because this feature is built using the compilation magic that makes inline lambdas work.

But the compilation step omits the AWS SDKs since these are present in a lambda anyways. So you can't use the AWS SDK in custom providers.

Running SST with Pulumi and it's been a great experience. Infrastructure and maintenance has been pleasant and SST's pre-fabs really make things easy to spin up resources.

My experience is that by stealing providers from Terraform, they failed to properly handle statically typed languages (Go) with certain providers (HCloud); I had problems with their ID type and had to abandon my Pulumi setup.

Have a look at https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ and tell me what you think. We don't have enough docs though. Tough being an open source thing that you want to keep open.

We use OpenTofu it’s pretty seamless

Now more will be using a combination of OpenTofu and Terraform, and there will probably be some tacit endorsement of OpenTofu by Hashicorp folks in their communication with those who are using both. Good to see!

Does it do ephemeral values yet?

Yep, as of yesterday’s 1.11 release it’s supported!

That also includes a new “enabled” meta argument, so you don’t have to hack around conditional resources with count = 0.

[0]: https://opentofu.org/blog/opentofu-1-11-0/

Disclaimer: affiliated with the project

How do you migrate from count/for_each to `enabled` ?

You can just switch from `count = 1` to `enabled = true` (or vice-versa, works back-and-forth) for a resource and tofu will automatically move it next time you apply.

It's pretty seamless.

Amazing. Good work !

That's cool! We'll still need to change all of the references to `resource[0]`, right? Or does tofu obviate that need as well?

I’m not sure I understand. You refer to the conditional resource fields normally - without list indices. You just have to make sure the object isn’t null.

There’s some samples in the docs[0] on safe access patterns!

[0]: https://opentofu.org/docs/language/meta-arguments/enabled/

And you don't get the annoying array form for the resulting resource with the `enabled` syntax, right?

EDIT: Oh just realized the sibling asked the same, but the doc doesn't state that clearly, although it seems to me that the doc implies that yeah, it doesn't use the array form anymore.

Yes indeed! It does not use the annoying array form.

Worth switching to Opentofu only for this, then! I fuckin hate the count pattern for conditional present/not present that leads to an array of size == 1.

Damn, might finally be able to use it. The lack of ephemeral values was a major blocker.

I was thinking the same thing about the "an IBM company". My guess is that it's a lazy find/replace.

I assume it's a matter of branding and making IBM look more modern by associating with the Hashicorp brand.

It’s one thing to say it once but 3 times in the same paragraph seems weird for sure!

> It's odd to always say "Hashicorp, an IBM company". Looks like they want to assign blame.

Or it's legal trying to preempt a risk.

If it was the author just wanting to point at IBM, they'd mention it just once or twice, but using that awkward phrase throughout the text makes me think it was an edit mandated by a careful lawyer.

"Hashicorp, an IBM company"

Common sense would be IBM mandating that branding, as opposed to Hashicorp.

They should have renamed it first to HashiCorp, an IBM Company CDK, then shut it down

It’s how Red Hat identifies themselves too

It's common when corps buy large enough companies that they don't want to kill the original brand. That's why you get hotels like "(something) by Hilton".

Do you mean Red Hat identifies itself using the phrase "Red Hat, an IBM Company"? Because I don't see any use of this on redhat.com (including that website's corporate "about" content) and if any Red Hatters are using this phrasing (I'm a current Red Hat employee) I haven't been aware of it.

I have seen it in several articles. (I don’t work for HashiCorp or Red Hat subsidiaries so no idea what is said or done inside those subs)

1. https://business.adobe.com/customer-success-stories/red-hat....

2. https://www.openpr.com/news/4100338/linux-operating-system-m...

You said "It’s how Red Hat identifies themselves too" but those two articles are not by Red Hat. So ... it's not how Red Hat identifies themselves, though it seems to be how Hashicorp identifies themselves.

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