I joined HashiCorp in 2016 to work on Nomad and have been on the product ever since. Definitely a lot of feelings today. When I joined HashiCorp was maybe 50 people. Armon Dadgar personally onboarded us one at a time, and showed me how to use the coffee maker (remember to wash your own dishes!). There have been a lot of ups (IPO) and downs (BUSL), but the Nomad team and users have been the best I've ever gotten to work with.
I've only ever worked at startups before, but HashiCorp itself left that category when it IPO'd. Each phase is definitely different, but then again I don't want go back to roadmapping on a ridiculously small whiteboard in a terrible sub-leased office and building release binaries on my laptop. That was fun once, but I'm ready for a new phase in my own life. I've heard the horror stories of being acquired by IBM, but I've also heard from people who have reveled in the resources and opportunities. I'm hoping for the best for Nomad, our users, and our team. I'd like to think there's room in the world for multiple schedulers, and if not, it won't be for lack of trying.
I've had the incredible displeasure of having to maintain multiple massive legacy COTS systems that were once designed by promising startups and ultimately got bought by IBM. IBM turned every last one into the shittiest enterprise software trash you can imagine.
Every IBM product I've ever used is universally reviled by every person I've met who also had to use it, without exaggeration in the slightest. If anything, I'm understating it: I make a significant premium on my salary because I'm one of the few people willing to put up with it.
My only expectation here is that I'll finally start weaning myself off terraform, I guess.
RHEL has had no significant investment to keep it from becoming irrelevant in the next five years. The datacenter and deployments of linux have changed so rapidly (mostly due to the new centralization and homogeneity of infrastructure investment) that RHELs niche is rapidly shrinking.
Image mode RHEL is a pretty significant investment.
Apart from that, in terms of keeping RHEL relevant, most of the attention is on making it easier to operate fleets at scale rather than the OS itself. Red Hat Insights, Image Builder, etc.
I would GTFO, IBM ain't your friend and ain't your savior and are unlikely to invest and the worse may come with increasing IBM management sticking their fingers in the pie. The folks who did well out of this already know, they have the checks to cash if that was your take away congratulations. Otherwise find another opportunity. If nothing else look around and find out what you are worth on the market and then have that hard discussion soon with HashiCorp/IBM.
Unfortunately IBM is going to ruin everything that was good about working for Hashicorp and eventually everything that was good about Hashicorp products.
I worked for a company acquired by IBM, and we held hope like you are doing, but it was only a matter of time before the benefit cuts, layoffs, and death of the pre-existing culture.
Your best bet is to quit right after the acquisition and hope they give you a big retention package to stay. These things are pretty common to ease acquisition transitions and the packages can be massive, easily six figures.
Then when the package pays out you can leave for good.
none of that has happened for us at Red Hat. Other than the one round of layoffs which occurred at the time that basically every tech company everywhere was doing much larger layoffs, that was pretty much it and there's no reason to think our layoffs wouldn't have been much greater at that time if we were not under the IBM umbrella.
Besides that, I dont even remember when we were acquired, absolutely nothing has changed for us in engineering; we have the same co-workers, still using all Red Hat email / intranets / IT, etc., there's still a healthy promotions pipeline, all of that. I dont even know anyone from the IBM side. We had heard all the horror stories of other companies IBM acquired but for whatever reason, it's not been that way at all for us at least in the engineering group.
Former Hatter here (Solution Architect Q2 '21 -> Q4 '22). Other than the discussions that took place around moving the storage/business products and teams under IBM (and the recently announcement transfer of middleware), I wouldn't have expected engineering to do that much interfacing with IBM. At most, division leadership maybe (this is just personal speculation). Finance and Sales on the other hand... quite a bit more.
We had a really fun time where the classic s-word was thrown around... "s y n e r g y". Some of the folks I got to meet across the aisle had a pretty strong pre-2010 mindset. Even around opinions of the acquisition, thinking it was just another case of SOP for the business and we'd be fully integrated Soon™.
They key thing people need to remember about the Red Hat acquisition is that it was purely for expertise and personnel. Red Hat has no (or very little) IP. It's not like IBM was snatching them up to take advantage of patents or whatnot. It's in their best interest to do as little as possible to poke the bear that is RH engineering because if there was ever a large scale exodus, IBM would be holding the worlds largest $34B sack of excrement we've seen. All of the value in the acquisition is the engineering talent and customer relationships Red Hat has, not the products themselves. The power of open source development!
It's heartening to hear that your experience in engineering has been positive (or neutral?) so far. Sales saw some massive churn because that's an area IBM did have a heavier impact in. There were some fairly ridiculous expectations set for year-over-year, completely dismissing previous results and obvious upcoming trends. Lost a lot of good reps over that...
Red Hatter since 2016, first in Consulting, now in Sales.
Oh the “synergy” rocket chat channel we had back then…
Things have been changing, for sure. So has the industry. So have our customers. By and large, Red Hatters on the ground have fought hard to preserve the culture. I have many friends across Red Hat, many that transitioned to IBM (Storage, some Middleware). Folks still love being a part of Red Hat.
On the topic of ridiculous expectations…there’s some. But Red Hatters generally figure out how to do ridiculous things like run the internet on open source software.
FWIW, the change at Red Hat has always been hard to separate between the forces of IBM and the reality of changing leadership. In a lot of ways those are intertwined because some of the new leadership came from IBM. Whatever change there was happened relatively gradually over many years.
Paul Cormier was a very different type of CEO than Jim Whitehurst for sure. But that's not an IBM thing, he was with Red Hat for 20 years.
I agree with you FWIW. The company also basically doubled in size from 2019 to 2023. It's very hard to grow like that and experience zero changes. And COVID changed everyone, at least a bit.
I worked with a bunch of people who had worked at a startup that got bought by IBM. As the other commenters attested, they too experienced that IBM is not the kind of company that's going to turn on the investment taps.
There are worse companies to get bought by, but if you've only ever worked at startups then you're not likely to enjoy what this becomes.
I spoke with a guy (too long ago) that was a "genius architect" and worked for a company that was small enough, that he got to implement his castles in the air. Knowing him, they might have been quite good, but it was one person that knew the details and made changes at the architect scale. He had a quirky way of thinking.
When IBM acquired that company, after a few weeks, this guy had a meeting with new engineering people. The very first meeting, they changed things for him. Instead of a single winding road of development, they wrote out a large spreadsheet. The rows were the distinguishable parts of his large'ish and clever architecture; the columns were assignments. They essentially dismantled his world into parts, for a team to implement. He was distraught. He didn't think like that. They did not discuss it, it was the marching orders. He quit shortly afterwards, which might have been optimal for IBM.
If you are a good at your job and want to deliver fast then you need to adapt to changing circumstances and continue on. Nothing wrong if you can’t but I have learnt that’s how you play along to deliver your best continuously.
Fairly large Nomad Enterprise user here, and I just want to say thanks for all of the work you and the team put in. I'm a big fan of Nomad and really appreciate the opportunities it has afforded me.
Regardless of the general sentiment, hoping for the best outcome for all of you.
No matter how long you worked at the acquiree and instrumental you were, be prepared for your opinions to be overridden by IBM lifers because you're not "true blue" (ie. directly to IBM). Also prepare for the bluewashing!
There are no resources and opportunities after being acquired by IBM. I worked for Red Hat when they were acquired. Our former CEO was quickly shown the door. We were making so much profit, almost a $1B in quarterly revenue. I left not long after the acquisition. Not long after I left, they laid off a bunch of staff.
No matter what they tell you, your day to day will not improve. For my area, it was mostly business as usual, but a net decrease in comp because IBM's ESPP is trash.
I have found the experience very different than what the OP's experience is.
As you know the layoffs that happened were around the same time as the rest of the industry layoffs were happening (fashion firing), I don't feel like it had a significant effect on the culture.
I am fully remote though, and have been for 15 years.
Hashicorp's stuff always struck me as pretty hacky with awkward design decisions. For Terraform (at least a few years ago) a badly reviewed PR could cause catastrophic data loss because resources are deleted without requiring an explicit tombstone.
Then they did the license change, which didn't reflect well on them.
Now it's being sold to IBM, which is essentially a consulting company trying to pivot to mostly undifferentiated software offerings. So I guess Hashicorp is basically over.
I suspect the various forks will be used for a while.
> For Terraform (at least a few years ago) a badly reviewed PR could cause catastrophic data loss because resources are deleted without requiring an explicit tombstone.
There have been lifecycle rules in place for as long as I can remember to prevent stuff like this. I'm not sure this is a "problem" unique to terraform.
IIRC, the lifecycle hook only prevents destruction of the resource if it needs to be replaced (e.g. change an immutable field). If you outright delete the resource declaration in code then it’s destroyed. I may be misremembering though
This is not a terraform problem. This is your problem. Theoretically, you should be able to recreate the resource back with only a downtime or some services affected. You should centralize/separate state and have stronger protections for it.
I think the previous post is saying a resource removed from a configuration file rather than an invocation explicitly deleting the resource in a command line. Of course if it’s removed from the config file, presumably the lifecycle configuration was as well!
What happens if you forget the lifecycle annotations or put them in the wrong place or you accidentally delete them? Last time I checked it was data loss, but that was a few years ago.
The same as in any other language when what you wrote was not what you intended? Sorry, I’m really confused what your complaint here is or how you’d prefer it to work. If you make a sensitive resource managed by any kind of IAC, of course the IAC can destroy it in a manner that would result in irretrievable data loss. The language has for forever put semantics in place to prevent that, and I’m not sure as a power user I’d want it any other way, I’m explicit with what I want it to do and dont want it making crazy assumptions that I didnt write.
like, what happens if you forget to free a pointer in c? sorry for snark but there are an unbelievably numerous amount of things to complain about in tf, never heard this one.
> what happens if you forget to free a pointer in c?
Assuming you mean 'forget' to free malloc'd space referenced by at least one pointer, that's an easy one .. it's reclaimed by the OS when the process ends.
Whether that's a bad thing or not really depends on context - there are entire suites of interlocked processing pipelines built about the notion of allocating required resources, throughputing data, and terminating on completion - no free()'s
surely my salient point is recognized regardless of semantics, but thanks for the correction. To use another example in another post - what happens if you DROP TABLE in sql?
"What happens if I turn a table saw on and start breakdancing on it?"
Of course you're going to hurt yourself. If you didn't put lifecycle blocks on your production resources, you weren't organizationally mature enough to be using Terraform in production. Take an associate Terraform course, this specific topic is covered in it.
I'm not familiar with every lifecycle argument but I don't know of any that prevent resources being destroyed if they are removed from the tf file (what the parent was talking about). prevent_destroy, per docs, only applies as long as the resource is defined.
I think the only way to avoid accidentally destroying a resource is to refer to it somewhere else, like in a depends_on array. At least that would block the plan.
An easy way to get someone to admit that terraform is a hacky child’s language is to ask how to simply print out the values of variables and resources you are using in terraform easily. This basic programming language 101 functionality is not present in the language
If you mean somehow printing things when the configuration is being applied... I think you just need to understand that it's neither a procedural language (it's declarative) nor general-purpose (it's infrastructure configuration).
Declarative language can absolutely print out what it does know at the time. Which of course won’t be everything. But if I’m taking an input and morphing it at runtime like looping or just moving the information around in a data structure which terraform absolutely allows you to do, the runtime of terraform has all that information. I just can’t get it out.
Plus, there are many times I don’t want to have to use the REPL. Maybe I’m in CI or something. The fact that I cannot iterate over values of locals and variables easy to see what they are in say, some nested list or object, easily and just print out the values as I’m going along for the things terraform does know is just crappy design
You have to be able to actually specify the output. And that does not handle all use cases. And it has requirements on how it can be run. And it takes the full lifecycle of the plan. And it won’t work in many circumstances without an apply.
So no. Terraform has the information internally in many cases. There’s just no easy way to print it out.
I concur. I looked pretty hard into adapting Serf as part of a custom service mesh and it had some bonkers designs such as a big "everything" interface used just to break a cyclic module dependency (perhaps between the CLI and the library? I don't recall exactly), as well as lots of stuff that only made sense if you wanted "something to run Consul on top of" rather than a carefully-designed tool of its own with limited but cohesive scope. It seemed like a lot of brittle "just-so" code, which to some extent is probably due to how Go discourages abstraction, but really rubbed me the wrong way.
Sorry HashiCorp, been there and got the Tee-shirt (pink) :)
Actually for me, the company I was at that IBM purchased was on the verge of folding, so in that case, IBM saved our jobs and I was there for many years.
We experienced arbitrary layoffs in 2023, followed by an ominous feeling that more layoffs were imminent. However, the announcement of a deal changed the situation.
Now, we are actively hiring for numerous positions.
Personally, I am not planning to stay much longer. I had hoped that our corp structure would be similar to RedHat, but it seems that they intend to fully integrate us into the IBM mothership.
I really wanted to work at HashiCorp in 2017/2018 and did five interviews in one day only to get ghosted[1]. That experience soured me on HC and its tools but I still admired them from afar.
What do you expect is the reason this happens? I would suspect your skill assessment after a handful of interviews is sound and most people liked you. Do you think you just run into a person eventually that doesn't vibe?
I read this as the GHOSTING is the thing that bother them. After a full day of interviews, it sounds like. The failure to be hired doesn't sound like it bothers them to me.
Who knows? I wish the hiring team remembered that real-life people are looking for work because they have bills to pay and regular communication is necessary.
Two months ago a founder reached out to me, gave me a coding project, I completed it (and got paid!), spoke with his co-founder, and then...nothing. At least I got paid but man, YOU reached out to ME. I don't get it.
If the company gets 30 applicants, 10 of which go to the final round and 7 of those are really good, if they only have 5 openings then 2 really good applicants are not getting offers.
I ended up having to move out of my hometown (Boston) to stay with my wife's friend's family and now we live in CA. I have a delicious loquat tree in my backyard so things worked out, haha!
Red Hat has been a very atypical approach. There has been some swapping of teams back and forth but, as far as I can tell (been out of it for a while), Red Hat is still quasi-independent. Still lots of changes (probably most notably because of a lot of growth) but strategic Red Hat areas still seem to be pretty independent.
Broadly independent but filled to the gills with folks who spent a decade or more at IBM before landing at Red Hat. While this has been true of rank and file for years, recently it’s true on the c-suite.
> Red Hat is still quasi-independent. Still lots of changes (probably most notably because of a lot of growth) but strategic Red Hat areas still seem to be pretty independent.
Most of the these type plays the home page has stacked toolbars / marketing / popups / announcements from the parent company and their branding everywhere (IBM XXX powered by Redhat)... I see very little IBM logo or corporate pop-up policy jank on redhat.com.
Nice. When I opened their homepage, I could not find anything obvious that shows they are owned by IBM. Literally, I had to search the HTML source code to find the sequential characters "IBM"!
Years before '93-'96 when I worked at Kaleida [1], a joint venture of Apple and IBM, alongside Taligent [2] their AIM Alliance [3] sister company, I laughed at the old joke:
Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?
A: IBM.
But then the joke was on me when I finally worked for a company owned by Apple and IBM at the same time, and experienced it first hand!
>Microsoft's worst nightmare is a conjoined Apple and IBM. No other single change in the dynamics of the IT industry could possibly do as much to emasculate Windows. [4]
Later when Sun was shopping itself around, there were rumors that IBM might buy it, so the joke would still apply, and it would have been a more dignified death than Oracle ending up with Sun, sigh.
Now that Apple's 15 times bigger than IBM, I bet the joke still applies, giving Apple a great reason NOT to merge with IBM.
Yeap we did. I wrote it off around the time of the licence change, just after they decided to ditch the TF Team plan in favour of the utterly ridiculous “Resources Under Management” billing model.
I knew the company had lost the plot at that point.
Who's the target audience for this pricing that can afford this? The RUM pricing is indeed quite ridiculous.
It feels quite ridiculous, especially if you are managing "soft" resources like IAM roles via Terraform / Pulumi. At least with real resources (say, RDS instances), one can argue that Terraform / Pulumi pricing is a small percentage of the cloud bill. But IAM roles are not charged for in cloud, and there are so many of them (especially if you use IaaC to create very elaborate scheme).
There is an argument to be made that price-sensitive customers are a neglected market. Granted, marketing to them is very different - they're prone to being scooped if someone comes by willing to sell your same product to them at a loss (hi, Amazon and Walmart) - but there are a lot more of them and you're not fighting every startup on the planet for the same handful of clients.
Business have made a killing in China and India for a reason, after all.
+ There’s an argument against every rule of thumb.
+ For what it is worth, the just-one-percent-of-all-Chinese is historically a poor business strategy.
+ As you point out, targeting price sensitive customers puts you in competition with Walmart and Amazon. Not only that but you are competing for their worst customers.
you're not fighting every startup on the planet for the same handful of clients
Not having access to good clients/customers suggests the business idea might not be viable. Chasing money from people without the wherewithal or will to pay, does not make your business idea viable.
That's fair. I wasn't coming for you and I'm certainly not trying to fight you from some kind of authority - I'm definitely not a businessperson.
The only point I was trying to get across is that even "bad" customers are still customers, and that there's still a lot of money to be made meeting people's needs doing the work others don't want to do. I feel like this applies from the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder all the way to the top - that's all. Perhaps I should've made that clearer, and that's on me.
An unsolicited side note: I think the bristling to this post was because of the language you were using. Talking about the poor as if they were to be discarded made you look a bit as if you have no empathy, which might not be fair to you. I get it - business require being hard-hearted if you want to get ahead because if you don't make tough decisions, someone else will - but it probably wasn't your best look, you know?
Good for who? Good for people getting bonuses? Good for executives?
It doesn't seem to be good for the customers or the people using the software or the people contributing to the open source code. It also doesn't seem to have been good for the investors, looking at the other comments.
It also creates horrible incentives. Oh I won't run this in isolated project or under a separate service account since that costs more, let's just pile everything together.
I’m finding that the basic backend functionality of Pulumi and Terraform managed cloud is fairly easy to build (especially Terraform, I can’t quite believe how absurdly simple their cloud is…)
It was made apparent right after the IPO. Our team got a new VP in charge who changed the mantra from practitioner-first to enterprise-first. Soon after they then laid-off anyone not working on enterprise features. It was a sad death of a great company culture. Mitchell left around the same time which, IMO, speaks volumes.
The older I get, the more I'm convinced that practitioner-first is the only reasonable way to drive a product's features, while enterprise-first is the only reasonable way to drive a company's revenue.
Which is to say strong sustainable products need both.
... but ffs don't let the entire company use enterprise as a reason to ignore practitioner feature requests.
This is probably inaccurate, but it seemed like they wrote it off as a safe move, with their main competitor, Pulumi, getting away with it.
However, to play devil's advocate, the number of Terraform resources is a (slightly weak) predictor for resource consumption. Every resource necessitates API calls that consume compute resources. So, if you're offering a "cloud" service that executes Terraform, it's probably a decent way to scale costs appropriately.
I hate it, though. It's user-hostile and forces people to adopt anti-patterns to limit costs.
> However, to play devil's advocate, the number of Terraform resources is a (slightly weak) predictor for resource consumption. Every resource necessitates API calls that consume compute resources. So, if you're offering a "cloud" service that executes Terraform, it's probably a decent way to scale costs appropriately.
That would make sense if you paid per API call to any of the cloud providers.
What happens when you run `terraform apply`? Arguably, a lot of things, but at its core it:
- Computes a list of resources and their expected state (where computation is generally proportional to the number of resources).
- Synchronizes the remote state by looking up each of these resources (where network ingress/egress is proportional to the number of resources).
- Compares the expected state to the remote state (again, where computation is generally proportional to the number of resources).
- Executes API calls to make the remote state match the expected state (again, where network ingress/egress is proportional to the number of resources).
- Stores the new state (where space is most certainly proportional to the number of resources)
This is a bit simplified, but my point is that in each of the five operations, the number of resources can be used as a predictor for the consumed compute resources (network/cpu/memory/disk). A customer with 10k resources is necessarily going to consume more compute resources than one with 10 resources.
Yeah, I'm not putting it forward as a justifying argument (just playing devil's advocate). However, it's probably how they justify it to themselves :) What makes it extra absurd is the price they charge per resource. That's where it turns into robbery.
> forces people to adopt anti-patterns to limit costs
The previous pricing model, per workspace, did the same. Pricing models are often based on "value received", and therefore often can be worked around with anti-patterns (e.g. you pay for Microsoft 365 per user, so you can have users share the same account to lower costs).
Depends how you define insider. Employees were subject to a 6 month lockup and during that time the price dropped dramatically, but they still had to pay taxes on the $80 IPO price. Execs and institutional investors that were able to sell at IPO made out quite well though.
Where you paying Terraform for anything at the time?
My doubt in the value of the company was that I've been using Terraform for years in Enterprise settings and never needed to pay the company for anything.
Eh. Lots of retail investors do well with the right stock. Lot's of Apple investors have done well over the years. Microsoft even with the right timing.
They didn't with HashiCorp certainly. Bought some but not too much and were part of a housecleaning a few years back (which I'm glad I did).
Broadcom VMware play. If you’re invested as an enterprise in the ecosystem, is going to be a while before you can extricate yourself. In the meantime, you must pay up.
I'm pretty good at engineering fast moves. I took a company off of Salesforce in 45 days. VMware servers are even easier to changeout. Never done Terraform though.
terraform is OSS, unless you're using the hosted HCP version (workspaces? I think they're called), which, I've been using terraform heavily and at scale since v0.7 and I have never once thought I needed or would pay for something like that.
I'm well aware and have contributed to OpenTofu project in a small manner. I hope you'll forgive me slightly misspeaking - any version of terraform before that license change is OSS. It is, however, perfectly free to use and most companies I've worked with are hard-pinned on a particular version of terraform and rarely on the bleeding edge.
"HashiCorp's capabilities drive significant synergies across multiple strategic growth areas for IBM, including Red Hat, watsonx, data security, IT automation and Consulting"
Nomad is way easier to self-manage than K8s, but GCP does that for me, with all the compliance boxes checked, for extremely cheap. Every cloud provider is in that boat. Nomad will be more work and more money, be it compute or enterprise fees. I'm sticking with k8s.
I agree up to a certain scale. I've managed a large Nomad/Consul setup (multiple clusters, geographically separated), and it was nothing but a nightmare. I believe fly.io had a similar experience.
Definitely not better than Kubernetes, but I don't regret working on it and I like it as a simpler alternative to Kubernetes. I remember trying to hire people for it and not a single person ever even heard of it.
20k+ nodes and 200k+ allocs. To be fair, Kubernetes cannot support this large of a cluster.
Most of my issues with it aren't related to the scale though. I wasn't involved in the operations of the cluster (though I did hear many "fun" stories from that team), I was just a user of Nomad trying to run a few thousand stateful allocs. Without custom resources and custom controllers, managing stateful services was a pain in the ass. Critical bugs would also often take years to get fixed. I had lots of fun getting paged in the middle of the night because 2 allocs would suddenly decide they now have the same index (https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/issues/10727)
These clowns want $2500 goddamned american dollars for the privilege of reading their bloviations on this topic, which i absolutely will not pay.
You know it's bad when the only people making money on this crap are management consultants.
Thinking back to 2014 using vagrant to develop services locally on my laptop I never would have imagined them getting swallowed up by big blue as some bizarre "AI" play. Shit is getting real weird around here.
> These clowns want $2500 goddamned american dollars for the privilege of reading their bloviations on this topic, which i absolutely will not pay.
You aren’t the target market for their “bloviations” - they are targeted at executives, and it isn’t like the executive pays this out of their own pocket, there is a budget and it comes out of the budget. Plus these reports generally aren’t aimed at technical people with significant pre-existing understanding of the field, their audience is more “I’m expected to make decisions about this topic but they didn’t cover it in my MBA”, or even “I need some convincing-sounding talking points to put in my slides for the board meeting, and if I cite an outside analyst they can’t argue with that”
Commonly with these reports a company buys a copy and then it can be freely shared within the company. Also $2,500 is likely just the list price and if you are a regular customer you’ll get a discount, or even find you’ve already paid for this report as part of some kind of subscription
Anyone prioritizing this nerfed, mindless dogshit over what their team is telling them and what's going on in the world around them is both an incompetent leader and a total idiot
A lot of the people paying for these analyst firm reports are sales people-so they can pass them on to their customers/prospects (to legally do that you often have to pay extra for “redistribution rights”)… and then the customer/prospect gets to read it for free
Who might not have much of an engineering team, or not one with relevant expertise… and why should they trust the vendor’s engineering team? If they are about to sign a contract for $$$, being able to find support for it in an independent analyst report can psychologically help a lot in the sales cycle
While the most useful reports for sales are those which directly compare products, like Gartner Magic Quadrant or Forrester Wave - a powerful tool if you come out on top - these kind of more background reports can help if the sales challenge is less “whose product should I buy?” and more “do I even need one of these products? should we be investing money in this?”
This sort of thing is why nobody gives a shit about IBM anymore and they have to keep just buying relevant companies to stay relevant.
Hopefully they do the right thing and hand hashicorp over to Redhat so they can open source the shit out of it. So they can do things like make OpenTofu the proper upstream for it, etc.
Did you intend to reference "It's a wonderful life?" When I read your comment I imagine a tiny child in Jimmy Stewart's arms, exclaiming the joys of capitalism ;-)
Who the heck is IDC's customer base, exactly? $2,500 for that, or $7,500 for this one about – drumroll, please – feature flags!
"Modern digital businesses need to be able to adapt to changing end-user demand, and since feature flags decouple release from deployment, it provides a good solution for improving software development velocity and business agility," said Jim Mercer, program vice president of IDC Software Development DevOps and DevSecOps. "Further, feature flags can help derisk releases, enable product experimentation, and allow for targeting and personalizing end-user experiences."
Something I always respected in Americans is their talent for making money from absolutely nothing, providing zero or negative value in the process of doing so. Obviously doesn't apply to everyone, but you have more than a fair share of these people.
Relatively few IDC clients are paying retail for single reports other than reprint rights. They're clients with broad employee access to events and reports in various areas. Had access for many years and, yes, having (supposedly validated) data is more or less essential for lots of presentations and other types of documents because, otherwise, your claims are viewed as pulling stuff out of you rear end.
> more or less essential for lots of presentations and other types of documents
Wait. What? This reminds me of the trope of the "wikipedia citation" in high school and college.. that move was worth at most a C+. Are you seriously saying these fucks actually seriously cite this bullshit? In this day and age where even crowdsourced wiki articles seem "credible"? What the actual fuck? I hate this shit.
Yeah but I could make this shit up in like.. 15-20min/mo vs working for a living like a normal human person. I'm just imagining the sheer number of vertical feet of skiing I'm missing out on and seeing red.
So, what is the practical TL;DR for everyone who isn't neither an employee nor investor? Hashicorp kinda made a lot of significant stuff, but that stuff is mostly FOSS and the commercial product is very niche. I am kinda surprised IBM even bought it, because it isn't very clear to me, how commercializeable this stuff is. So what does it mean? Will IBM most likely kill some FOSS products? Is this even possible? Were, say, terraform or nomad developed mostly by internal devs, or is there a solid enough community already to keep up with development or simply fork the tool if things go south?
The consolidation of power and IP into just several tech companies is worrying to me. Having the misfortune of working at IBM for just a few months, IBM leadership will give it the RedHat treatment. The dinosaurs at IBM will shelve their IP, and sell it for parts. Maybe Bloodmoar will buy up the rest and squeeze whatever remaining profit from acquisition.
If given the chance, just take the exit rather than trying to integrate into IBM.
I joined HashiCorp in 2016 to work on Nomad and have been on the product ever since. Definitely a lot of feelings today. When I joined HashiCorp was maybe 50 people. Armon Dadgar personally onboarded us one at a time, and showed me how to use the coffee maker (remember to wash your own dishes!). There have been a lot of ups (IPO) and downs (BUSL), but the Nomad team and users have been the best I've ever gotten to work with.
I've only ever worked at startups before, but HashiCorp itself left that category when it IPO'd. Each phase is definitely different, but then again I don't want go back to roadmapping on a ridiculously small whiteboard in a terrible sub-leased office and building release binaries on my laptop. That was fun once, but I'm ready for a new phase in my own life. I've heard the horror stories of being acquired by IBM, but I've also heard from people who have reveled in the resources and opportunities. I'm hoping for the best for Nomad, our users, and our team. I'd like to think there's room in the world for multiple schedulers, and if not, it won't be for lack of trying.
I've had the incredible displeasure of having to maintain multiple massive legacy COTS systems that were once designed by promising startups and ultimately got bought by IBM. IBM turned every last one into the shittiest enterprise software trash you can imagine.
Every IBM product I've ever used is universally reviled by every person I've met who also had to use it, without exaggeration in the slightest. If anything, I'm understating it: I make a significant premium on my salary because I'm one of the few people willing to put up with it.
My only expectation here is that I'll finally start weaning myself off terraform, I guess.
How is Red Hat going after the acquisition by IBM? From my view, it is going well. The enterprise product (RHEL) is still excellent.
It's going basically fine. If you're in engineering you would never notice the difference.
Dropping CentOS was a terrible decision. I’m not sure if that happened before or after the acquisition though.
RHEL has had no significant investment to keep it from becoming irrelevant in the next five years. The datacenter and deployments of linux have changed so rapidly (mostly due to the new centralization and homogeneity of infrastructure investment) that RHELs niche is rapidly shrinking.
Image mode RHEL is a pretty significant investment.
Apart from that, in terms of keeping RHEL relevant, most of the attention is on making it easier to operate fleets at scale rather than the OS itself. Red Hat Insights, Image Builder, etc.
This is clearly someone that is not paying attention to what Red Hat is doing.
RHEL is the enterprise gold standard.
Fedora is a lot of the pipeline for it, which itself has become an incredible server and desktop platform.
All the work with Open shift, backstage, podman / qubelet, etc.
They're going to be fine, from my graybeard position.
RHEL 10 beta has some interesting stuff in it. Running the OS itself as a container caught my eye.
Podman is pretty good.
Isn’t MQ pretty good?
I would GTFO, IBM ain't your friend and ain't your savior and are unlikely to invest and the worse may come with increasing IBM management sticking their fingers in the pie. The folks who did well out of this already know, they have the checks to cash if that was your take away congratulations. Otherwise find another opportunity. If nothing else look around and find out what you are worth on the market and then have that hard discussion soon with HashiCorp/IBM.
Unfortunately IBM is going to ruin everything that was good about working for Hashicorp and eventually everything that was good about Hashicorp products.
I worked for a company acquired by IBM, and we held hope like you are doing, but it was only a matter of time before the benefit cuts, layoffs, and death of the pre-existing culture.
Your best bet is to quit right after the acquisition and hope they give you a big retention package to stay. These things are pretty common to ease acquisition transitions and the packages can be massive, easily six figures. Then when the package pays out you can leave for good.
Red Hatter here.
none of that has happened for us at Red Hat. Other than the one round of layoffs which occurred at the time that basically every tech company everywhere was doing much larger layoffs, that was pretty much it and there's no reason to think our layoffs wouldn't have been much greater at that time if we were not under the IBM umbrella.
Besides that, I dont even remember when we were acquired, absolutely nothing has changed for us in engineering; we have the same co-workers, still using all Red Hat email / intranets / IT, etc., there's still a healthy promotions pipeline, all of that. I dont even know anyone from the IBM side. We had heard all the horror stories of other companies IBM acquired but for whatever reason, it's not been that way at all for us at least in the engineering group.
Former Hatter here (Solution Architect Q2 '21 -> Q4 '22). Other than the discussions that took place around moving the storage/business products and teams under IBM (and the recently announcement transfer of middleware), I wouldn't have expected engineering to do that much interfacing with IBM. At most, division leadership maybe (this is just personal speculation). Finance and Sales on the other hand... quite a bit more.
We had a really fun time where the classic s-word was thrown around... "s y n e r g y". Some of the folks I got to meet across the aisle had a pretty strong pre-2010 mindset. Even around opinions of the acquisition, thinking it was just another case of SOP for the business and we'd be fully integrated Soon™.
They key thing people need to remember about the Red Hat acquisition is that it was purely for expertise and personnel. Red Hat has no (or very little) IP. It's not like IBM was snatching them up to take advantage of patents or whatnot. It's in their best interest to do as little as possible to poke the bear that is RH engineering because if there was ever a large scale exodus, IBM would be holding the worlds largest $34B sack of excrement we've seen. All of the value in the acquisition is the engineering talent and customer relationships Red Hat has, not the products themselves. The power of open source development!
It's heartening to hear that your experience in engineering has been positive (or neutral?) so far. Sales saw some massive churn because that's an area IBM did have a heavier impact in. There were some fairly ridiculous expectations set for year-over-year, completely dismissing previous results and obvious upcoming trends. Lost a lot of good reps over that...
Red Hatter since 2016, first in Consulting, now in Sales.
Oh the “synergy” rocket chat channel we had back then…
Things have been changing, for sure. So has the industry. So have our customers. By and large, Red Hatters on the ground have fought hard to preserve the culture. I have many friends across Red Hat, many that transitioned to IBM (Storage, some Middleware). Folks still love being a part of Red Hat.
On the topic of ridiculous expectations…there’s some. But Red Hatters generally figure out how to do ridiculous things like run the internet on open source software.
Every time you say rocket chat, I have to appear.
FWIW, the change at Red Hat has always been hard to separate between the forces of IBM and the reality of changing leadership. In a lot of ways those are intertwined because some of the new leadership came from IBM. Whatever change there was happened relatively gradually over many years.
Paul Cormier was a very different type of CEO than Jim Whitehurst for sure. But that's not an IBM thing, he was with Red Hat for 20 years.
I agree with you FWIW. The company also basically doubled in size from 2019 to 2023. It's very hard to grow like that and experience zero changes. And COVID changed everyone, at least a bit.
I worked with a bunch of people who had worked at a startup that got bought by IBM. As the other commenters attested, they too experienced that IBM is not the kind of company that's going to turn on the investment taps.
There are worse companies to get bought by, but if you've only ever worked at startups then you're not likely to enjoy what this becomes.
I spoke with a guy (too long ago) that was a "genius architect" and worked for a company that was small enough, that he got to implement his castles in the air. Knowing him, they might have been quite good, but it was one person that knew the details and made changes at the architect scale. He had a quirky way of thinking.
When IBM acquired that company, after a few weeks, this guy had a meeting with new engineering people. The very first meeting, they changed things for him. Instead of a single winding road of development, they wrote out a large spreadsheet. The rows were the distinguishable parts of his large'ish and clever architecture; the columns were assignments. They essentially dismantled his world into parts, for a team to implement. He was distraught. He didn't think like that. They did not discuss it, it was the marching orders. He quit shortly afterwards, which might have been optimal for IBM.
If you are a good at your job and want to deliver fast then you need to adapt to changing circumstances and continue on. Nothing wrong if you can’t but I have learnt that’s how you play along to deliver your best continuously.
Fairly large Nomad Enterprise user here, and I just want to say thanks for all of the work you and the team put in. I'm a big fan of Nomad and really appreciate the opportunities it has afforded me.
Regardless of the general sentiment, hoping for the best outcome for all of you.
What a blessing to see your comment today. It's been a while. I hope this works in your favor, whatever that means.
No matter how long you worked at the acquiree and instrumental you were, be prepared for your opinions to be overridden by IBM lifers because you're not "true blue" (ie. directly to IBM). Also prepare for the bluewashing!
There are no resources and opportunities after being acquired by IBM. I worked for Red Hat when they were acquired. Our former CEO was quickly shown the door. We were making so much profit, almost a $1B in quarterly revenue. I left not long after the acquisition. Not long after I left, they laid off a bunch of staff.
No matter what they tell you, your day to day will not improve. For my area, it was mostly business as usual, but a net decrease in comp because IBM's ESPP is trash.
if you left right after the acquisition how can you even speak to what the experience has been?
I have found the experience very different than what the OP's experience is.
As you know the layoffs that happened were around the same time as the rest of the industry layoffs were happening (fashion firing), I don't feel like it had a significant effect on the culture.
I am fully remote though, and have been for 15 years.
It was within a year, not like the day after.
Hashicorp's stuff always struck me as pretty hacky with awkward design decisions. For Terraform (at least a few years ago) a badly reviewed PR could cause catastrophic data loss because resources are deleted without requiring an explicit tombstone.
Then they did the license change, which didn't reflect well on them.
Now it's being sold to IBM, which is essentially a consulting company trying to pivot to mostly undifferentiated software offerings. So I guess Hashicorp is basically over.
I suspect the various forks will be used for a while.
> For Terraform (at least a few years ago) a badly reviewed PR could cause catastrophic data loss because resources are deleted without requiring an explicit tombstone.
There have been lifecycle rules in place for as long as I can remember to prevent stuff like this. I'm not sure this is a "problem" unique to terraform.
IIRC, the lifecycle hook only prevents destruction of the resource if it needs to be replaced (e.g. change an immutable field). If you outright delete the resource declaration in code then it’s destroyed. I may be misremembering though
This is not a terraform problem. This is your problem. Theoretically, you should be able to recreate the resource back with only a downtime or some services affected. You should centralize/separate state and have stronger protections for it.
I'm pretty sure you are. I've had it protect me from `terraform destroy`.
I think the previous post is saying a resource removed from a configuration file rather than an invocation explicitly deleting the resource in a command line. Of course if it’s removed from the config file, presumably the lifecycle configuration was as well!
What happens if you forget the lifecycle annotations or put them in the wrong place or you accidentally delete them? Last time I checked it was data loss, but that was a few years ago.
The same as in any other language when what you wrote was not what you intended? Sorry, I’m really confused what your complaint here is or how you’d prefer it to work. If you make a sensitive resource managed by any kind of IAC, of course the IAC can destroy it in a manner that would result in irretrievable data loss. The language has for forever put semantics in place to prevent that, and I’m not sure as a power user I’d want it any other way, I’m explicit with what I want it to do and dont want it making crazy assumptions that I didnt write.
like, what happens if you forget to free a pointer in c? sorry for snark but there are an unbelievably numerous amount of things to complain about in tf, never heard this one.
> what happens if you forget to free a pointer in c?
Assuming you mean 'forget' to free malloc'd space referenced by at least one pointer, that's an easy one .. it's reclaimed by the OS when the process ends.
Whether that's a bad thing or not really depends on context - there are entire suites of interlocked processing pipelines built about the notion of allocating required resources, throughputing data, and terminating on completion - no free()'s
surely my salient point is recognized regardless of semantics, but thanks for the correction. To use another example in another post - what happens if you DROP TABLE in sql?
What happens is that you call Iron Mountain and find out that those tapes don't actually have anything useful on them.
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I mean its also data loss if you run DROP DATABASE when you shouldn't. thats not sqls fault
I think in this context it's that your database server is lost if you accidentally forget to write KEEP DATABASE.
"What happens if I turn a table saw on and start breakdancing on it?"
Of course you're going to hurt yourself. If you didn't put lifecycle blocks on your production resources, you weren't organizationally mature enough to be using Terraform in production. Take an associate Terraform course, this specific topic is covered in it.
I'm not familiar with every lifecycle argument but I don't know of any that prevent resources being destroyed if they are removed from the tf file (what the parent was talking about). prevent_destroy, per docs, only applies as long as the resource is defined.
I think the only way to avoid accidentally destroying a resource is to refer to it somewhere else, like in a depends_on array. At least that would block the plan.
An easy way to get someone to admit that terraform is a hacky child’s language is to ask how to simply print out the values of variables and resources you are using in terraform easily. This basic programming language 101 functionality is not present in the language
Declarative language can absolutely print out what it does know at the time. Which of course won’t be everything. But if I’m taking an input and morphing it at runtime like looping or just moving the information around in a data structure which terraform absolutely allows you to do, the runtime of terraform has all that information. I just can’t get it out.
Plus, there are many times I don’t want to have to use the REPL. Maybe I’m in CI or something. The fact that I cannot iterate over values of locals and variables easy to see what they are in say, some nested list or object, easily and just print out the values as I’m going along for the things terraform does know is just crappy design
This works great for toy examples and fails the moment you have 1 (one) module
It doesn't fail, but you're right you can't reach inside submodules with terraform console; I wish you could.
I agree that terraform is hacky, but is "terraform output {variable name}" not how you would do that?
You have to be able to actually specify the output. And that does not handle all use cases. And it has requirements on how it can be run. And it takes the full lifecycle of the plan. And it won’t work in many circumstances without an apply.
So no. Terraform has the information internally in many cases. There’s just no easy way to print it out.
HCL isn’t a programming language. This seems to be the main misconception about it and Terraform.
Any sufficiently large configuration language eventually becomes Turing complete (or close to it). See HCL, GitHub actions, kubernetes.
I concur. I looked pretty hard into adapting Serf as part of a custom service mesh and it had some bonkers designs such as a big "everything" interface used just to break a cyclic module dependency (perhaps between the CLI and the library? I don't recall exactly), as well as lots of stuff that only made sense if you wanted "something to run Consul on top of" rather than a carefully-designed tool of its own with limited but cohesive scope. It seemed like a lot of brittle "just-so" code, which to some extent is probably due to how Go discourages abstraction, but really rubbed me the wrong way.
Sorry HashiCorp, been there and got the Tee-shirt (pink) :)
Actually for me, the company I was at that IBM purchased was on the verge of folding, so in that case, IBM saved our jobs and I was there for many years.
We experienced arbitrary layoffs in 2023, followed by an ominous feeling that more layoffs were imminent. However, the announcement of a deal changed the situation.
Now, we are actively hiring for numerous positions.
Personally, I am not planning to stay much longer. I had hoped that our corp structure would be similar to RedHat, but it seems that they intend to fully integrate us into the IBM mothership.
I really wanted to work at HashiCorp in 2017/2018 and did five interviews in one day only to get ghosted[1]. That experience soured me on HC and its tools but I still admired them from afar.
End of an era.
---
[1]: https://blog.webb.page/2018-01-11-why-the-job-search-sucks.t...
What do you expect is the reason this happens? I would suspect your skill assessment after a handful of interviews is sound and most people liked you. Do you think you just run into a person eventually that doesn't vibe?
I read this as the GHOSTING is the thing that bother them. After a full day of interviews, it sounds like. The failure to be hired doesn't sound like it bothers them to me.
Who knows? I wish the hiring team remembered that real-life people are looking for work because they have bills to pay and regular communication is necessary.
Two months ago a founder reached out to me, gave me a coding project, I completed it (and got paid!), spoke with his co-founder, and then...nothing. At least I got paid but man, YOU reached out to ME. I don't get it.
If the company gets 30 applicants, 10 of which go to the final round and 7 of those are really good, if they only have 5 openings then 2 really good applicants are not getting offers.
Those two should at least get told they didn't make it.
That sucks and I apologize this happened to you.
It is what it is.
I ended up having to move out of my hometown (Boston) to stay with my wife's friend's family and now we live in CA. I have a delicious loquat tree in my backyard so things worked out, haha!
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Red Hat has been a very atypical approach. There has been some swapping of teams back and forth but, as far as I can tell (been out of it for a while), Red Hat is still quasi-independent. Still lots of changes (probably most notably because of a lot of growth) but strategic Red Hat areas still seem to be pretty independent.
Broadly independent but filled to the gills with folks who spent a decade or more at IBM before landing at Red Hat. While this has been true of rank and file for years, recently it’s true on the c-suite.
> Red Hat is still quasi-independent. Still lots of changes (probably most notably because of a lot of growth) but strategic Red Hat areas still seem to be pretty independent.
Still broadly correct.
Was HashiCorp ever profitable since its IPO? From here, it says no: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/hcp/financials/
If never profitable (or terrible return on equity), why would you call the layoffs "arbitrary"? It seems pretty reasonable to me.
One of those places (like HP, Oracle and Broadcom, and also CA back in the day) where once good companies go to die.
Redhat has really delivered for IBM and IBM seems not to have messed it up too bad.
Some of this is obvious (linux and mainframes aren't a bad combo). Some of it I'm a bit surprised by (openshift revenue seems strong).
Probably already basically returned purchase price in revenue and much more than purchase price in market cap.
A noticeable thing is
https://www.redhat.com/en
Most of the these type plays the home page has stacked toolbars / marketing / popups / announcements from the parent company and their branding everywhere (IBM XXX powered by Redhat)... I see very little IBM logo or corporate pop-up policy jank on redhat.com.
Nice. When I opened their homepage, I could not find anything obvious that shows they are owned by IBM. Literally, I had to search the HTML source code to find the sequential characters "IBM"!
As a current Red Hat employee, I can say that they've treated us far better than the likes of Oracle or Broadcom would have.
Give it time.
It's been almost 6 years
People who stayed at IBM because they could not afford going anywhere else.
People who worked at companies acquired by IBM and could not afford going anywhere else.
A mixture of both will be involved from now on in decision making regarding your platform formation core products.
Condolences, Hashicorp folks. Been there.
Enjoy switching to Lotus Notes.
It's called HCL Notes now: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HCL_Notes
And Hashicorp are experts in HCL so I am sure they will love it.
This is hilarious.
IBM switched off Notes to Microsoft 365, maybe two years ago or so.
I only correct you because it's an even bigger indictment of Notes that IBM switched off of it.
Been gone for a couple of years now. Outlook replaced it. Legacy Domino apps still around in various places though.
Years before '93-'96 when I worked at Kaleida [1], a joint venture of Apple and IBM, alongside Taligent [2] their AIM Alliance [3] sister company, I laughed at the old joke:
Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?
A: IBM.
But then the joke was on me when I finally worked for a company owned by Apple and IBM at the same time, and experienced it first hand!
>Microsoft's worst nightmare is a conjoined Apple and IBM. No other single change in the dynamics of the IT industry could possibly do as much to emasculate Windows. [4]
Later when Sun was shopping itself around, there were rumors that IBM might buy it, so the joke would still apply, and it would have been a more dignified death than Oracle ending up with Sun, sigh.
Now that Apple's 15 times bigger than IBM, I bet the joke still applies, giving Apple a great reason NOT to merge with IBM.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance
[4] https://www.computerworld.com/article/1682358/microsoft-chea...
All these redhatters talking like centos isnt dead. Like wtf, the Kool aid must taste good.
I was really hoping this wouldn't happen given one org (IBM) effectively controls both Terraform and Ansible.
Salt and Puppet both don't seem in a great place.
System Initiative is just AWS still, yeah?
Welp.
Investors at IPO lost quite a bit of money...
Yeap we did. I wrote it off around the time of the licence change, just after they decided to ditch the TF Team plan in favour of the utterly ridiculous “Resources Under Management” billing model.
I knew the company had lost the plot at that point.
Who's the target audience for this pricing that can afford this? The RUM pricing is indeed quite ridiculous.
It feels quite ridiculous, especially if you are managing "soft" resources like IAM roles via Terraform / Pulumi. At least with real resources (say, RDS instances), one can argue that Terraform / Pulumi pricing is a small percentage of the cloud bill. But IAM roles are not charged for in cloud, and there are so many of them (especially if you use IaaC to create very elaborate scheme).
Who's the target audience for this pricing that can afford this?
The kind of customers it is good to have.
Because filtering out price sensitive customers is a sound business strategy.
As a rule of thumb, solve any problem your customer might have. Except not having money.
There is an argument to be made that price-sensitive customers are a neglected market. Granted, marketing to them is very different - they're prone to being scooped if someone comes by willing to sell your same product to them at a loss (hi, Amazon and Walmart) - but there are a lot more of them and you're not fighting every startup on the planet for the same handful of clients.
Business have made a killing in China and India for a reason, after all.
+ There’s an argument against every rule of thumb.
+ For what it is worth, the just-one-percent-of-all-Chinese is historically a poor business strategy.
+ As you point out, targeting price sensitive customers puts you in competition with Walmart and Amazon. Not only that but you are competing for their worst customers.
you're not fighting every startup on the planet for the same handful of clients
Not having access to good clients/customers suggests the business idea might not be viable. Chasing money from people without the wherewithal or will to pay, does not make your business idea viable.
But again it is a rule of thumb.
That's fair. I wasn't coming for you and I'm certainly not trying to fight you from some kind of authority - I'm definitely not a businessperson.
The only point I was trying to get across is that even "bad" customers are still customers, and that there's still a lot of money to be made meeting people's needs doing the work others don't want to do. I feel like this applies from the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder all the way to the top - that's all. Perhaps I should've made that clearer, and that's on me.
An unsolicited side note: I think the bristling to this post was because of the language you were using. Talking about the poor as if they were to be discarded made you look a bit as if you have no empathy, which might not be fair to you. I get it - business require being hard-hearted if you want to get ahead because if you don't make tough decisions, someone else will - but it probably wasn't your best look, you know?
Good for who? Good for people getting bonuses? Good for executives?
It doesn't seem to be good for the customers or the people using the software or the people contributing to the open source code. It also doesn't seem to have been good for the investors, looking at the other comments.
Good for people who got in pre-IPO. Bad for people who got in post-IPO.
It also creates horrible incentives. Oh I won't run this in isolated project or under a separate service account since that costs more, let's just pile everything together.
To be fair to RUM pricing, there are also horrible incentives for workflow invocation based pricing models, or workspace count models.
Pulumi’s RUM pricing is why I was very hesitant to even evaluate it as an alternative to just using terraform.
I’m finding that the basic backend functionality of Pulumi and Terraform managed cloud is fairly easy to build (especially Terraform, I can’t quite believe how absurdly simple their cloud is…)
Plus there are open source projects like Atlantis that fit the bill for many teams with regards to terraform automation.
That must explain why they broke up the S3 resources into a bunch of tiny resources.
It was made apparent right after the IPO. Our team got a new VP in charge who changed the mantra from practitioner-first to enterprise-first. Soon after they then laid-off anyone not working on enterprise features. It was a sad death of a great company culture. Mitchell left around the same time which, IMO, speaks volumes.
The older I get, the more I'm convinced that practitioner-first is the only reasonable way to drive a product's features, while enterprise-first is the only reasonable way to drive a company's revenue.
Which is to say strong sustainable products need both.
... but ffs don't let the entire company use enterprise as a reason to ignore practitioner feature requests.
This is probably inaccurate, but it seemed like they wrote it off as a safe move, with their main competitor, Pulumi, getting away with it.
However, to play devil's advocate, the number of Terraform resources is a (slightly weak) predictor for resource consumption. Every resource necessitates API calls that consume compute resources. So, if you're offering a "cloud" service that executes Terraform, it's probably a decent way to scale costs appropriately.
I hate it, though. It's user-hostile and forces people to adopt anti-patterns to limit costs.
> However, to play devil's advocate, the number of Terraform resources is a (slightly weak) predictor for resource consumption. Every resource necessitates API calls that consume compute resources. So, if you're offering a "cloud" service that executes Terraform, it's probably a decent way to scale costs appropriately.
That would make sense if you paid per API call to any of the cloud providers.
What happens when you run `terraform apply`? Arguably, a lot of things, but at its core it:
- Computes a list of resources and their expected state (where computation is generally proportional to the number of resources).
- Synchronizes the remote state by looking up each of these resources (where network ingress/egress is proportional to the number of resources).
- Compares the expected state to the remote state (again, where computation is generally proportional to the number of resources).
- Executes API calls to make the remote state match the expected state (again, where network ingress/egress is proportional to the number of resources).
- Stores the new state (where space is most certainly proportional to the number of resources)
This is a bit simplified, but my point is that in each of the five operations, the number of resources can be used as a predictor for the consumed compute resources (network/cpu/memory/disk). A customer with 10k resources is necessarily going to consume more compute resources than one with 10 resources.
In absolute terms, I agree with you. But in practical terms I would wager it is negligible.
Yeah, I'm not putting it forward as a justifying argument (just playing devil's advocate). However, it's probably how they justify it to themselves :) What makes it extra absurd is the price they charge per resource. That's where it turns into robbery.
Sure but it’s calling those service apis directly. The “hard work” is not being done by the client making those calls. Presumably.
> forces people to adopt anti-patterns to limit costs
The previous pricing model, per workspace, did the same. Pricing models are often based on "value received", and therefore often can be worked around with anti-patterns (e.g. you pay for Microsoft 365 per user, so you can have users share the same account to lower costs).
Pricing, and, generally speaking, customer engagement were not their strength
Had to check the numbers. IPO at $80 and sold to IBM for $35.
Not great for investors, but insiders benefitted a lot!
Depends how you define insider. Employees were subject to a 6 month lockup and during that time the price dropped dramatically, but they still had to pay taxes on the $80 IPO price. Execs and institutional investors that were able to sell at IPO made out quite well though.
Too bad you can't sell the option to buy your shares the day you get them at whatever price you want :/
Execs are employees, were they really exempt from the lockout? Seems unethical.
thats preferred stock baby. Startups still a scam to work for.
Nearly certainly they were not. Any stock holder would be blacked out including existing investors.
That’s simply not true. You can look at the SEC filings and see exactly who was able to liquidate during the IPO.
I’m not passing judgment as to whether that’s “good” or “bad.” It simply is.
There are always haves and have-nots, lol. “Tech” isn’t exempted.
> they still had to pay taxes on the $80 IPO price
They will get capital losses.
That's not perfect.
IPOs became exits in 2008. They’re no longer about raising capital
Worst investment I ever made. I like Mitchell and Armon so I emotionally just bought the IPO and closed my eyes presuming a TWLO or NET. Oh well!! :)
Yup. My worst investment. Never invest at IPO I guess.
If that's your worst investment, you're doing great. I bought stock in HashiCorp. I also bought stock in EBET, for a return of -100.00%.
Yup that's me. Happy user of terraform at that time so bought their stock on the day of IPO.
Where you paying Terraform for anything at the time?
My doubt in the value of the company was that I've been using Terraform for years in Enterprise settings and never needed to pay the company for anything.
Totally worthless.
Running a few products. Quoted $1MM or so over 3 years for support. I was able to say no and saved six figures each month.
It's been a zombie for a while...
*retail investors
Retail will always be holding the bag. This is known.
Eh. Lots of retail investors do well with the right stock. Lot's of Apple investors have done well over the years. Microsoft even with the right timing.
They didn't with HashiCorp certainly. Bought some but not too much and were part of a housecleaning a few years back (which I'm glad I did).
How far away from IPO are Apple and Microsoft now? I think parent is lamenting the state of IPOs as cashing out, if anything.
I'm surprised the deal was worth more than the market cap when they did the license rug pull.
Broadcom VMware play. If you’re invested as an enterprise in the ecosystem, is going to be a while before you can extricate yourself. In the meantime, you must pay up.
I'm pretty good at engineering fast moves. I took a company off of Salesforce in 45 days. VMware servers are even easier to changeout. Never done Terraform though.
terraform is OSS, unless you're using the hosted HCP version (workspaces? I think they're called), which, I've been using terraform heavily and at scale since v0.7 and I have never once thought I needed or would pay for something like that.
Terraform is not OSS, it switched to a source-available license over a year ago.
OpenTofu[0] is the OSS fork though.
[0]: https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu
Disclaimer: involved with OpenTofu
I'm well aware and have contributed to OpenTofu project in a small manner. I hope you'll forgive me slightly misspeaking - any version of terraform before that license change is OSS. It is, however, perfectly free to use and most companies I've worked with are hard-pinned on a particular version of terraform and rarely on the bleeding edge.
No worries, that makes sense!
And thanks for contributing :)
Yep. You're thinking of TFE. Workspaces and Stacks are the the advertised method for building composable infra.
That's true, but it's easier to switch from Terraform to Pulumi than it is to move from VMware to some other virtualization platform.
secrets, too.
Org's already knee deep in vault / vault-agent for PKI and secrets wont be eager to switch.
But vault was already a pretty enterprise offering. I'd imagine most people running it had an existing contract.
"HashiCorp's capabilities drive significant synergies across multiple strategic growth areas for IBM, including Red Hat, watsonx, data security, IT automation and Consulting"
this sounds like corporate AI slop
No wonder Vault is now trying to get me to pay $50 a month to store more than 25 secrets. Enshittifucation has already begun.
Will terraform still work for GCP and AWS?
Do any Opentofu cloud providers (like spacelift) offer a managed migration tool to their cloud and opentofu from TFE or TFC?
(Asking for a friend).
Here you go[0]! Docs are linked in the README, and there’s also a recent blog post about it[1].
In any case, make sure to reach out via the website chat widget / email / demo form, we’re happy to help!
The migration from Terraform to OpenTofu is pretty seamless right now, and documented in the OpenTofu docs[2].
[0]: https://github.com/spacelift-io/spacelift-migration-kit
[1]: https://spacelift.io/blog/how-to-migrate-from-terraform-clou...
[2]: https://opentofu.org/docs/intro/migration/
Disclaimer: work at Spacelift
Is this even the same company that created Terraform? HashiCorp's trajectory has been baffling...
Ansible + Terriform synergized become Terrible.
IBM has been on a shopping spree of garbage companies. Which tools are next?
Wordpress!
Atlassian?
Too big. Maybe redis?
Seems too big. Market cap is 1/3 of IBM's.
I love it when IBM tries to stay relevant!
Sad to see this, but I will again shill for HashiCorp's Nomad as a better alternative to Kubernetes.
Nomad is way easier to self-manage than K8s, but GCP does that for me, with all the compliance boxes checked, for extremely cheap. Every cloud provider is in that boat. Nomad will be more work and more money, be it compute or enterprise fees. I'm sticking with k8s.
The convenience and ease of use isn't worth the increased costs?
Who's to say it doesn't cost more in time and effort?
I agree up to a certain scale. I've managed a large Nomad/Consul setup (multiple clusters, geographically separated), and it was nothing but a nightmare. I believe fly.io had a similar experience.
Definitely not better than Kubernetes, but I don't regret working on it and I like it as a simpler alternative to Kubernetes. I remember trying to hire people for it and not a single person ever even heard of it.
Having worked with a very large Nomad cluster, I cannot disagree more.
For simple use cases, sure, but you could also just use AWS ECS or a similar cloud tool for an even easier experience.
Can you quantify “very large”?
20k+ nodes and 200k+ allocs. To be fair, Kubernetes cannot support this large of a cluster.
Most of my issues with it aren't related to the scale though. I wasn't involved in the operations of the cluster (though I did hear many "fun" stories from that team), I was just a user of Nomad trying to run a few thousand stateful allocs. Without custom resources and custom controllers, managing stateful services was a pain in the ass. Critical bugs would also often take years to get fixed. I had lots of fun getting paged in the middle of the night because 2 allocs would suddenly decide they now have the same index (https://github.com/hashicorp/nomad/issues/10727)
> By 2028, it is projected that generative AI will lead to the creation of 1 billion new cloud-native applications.
lmfao what the fuck? The source they reference: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US51953724
These clowns want $2500 goddamned american dollars for the privilege of reading their bloviations on this topic, which i absolutely will not pay.
You know it's bad when the only people making money on this crap are management consultants.
Thinking back to 2014 using vagrant to develop services locally on my laptop I never would have imagined them getting swallowed up by big blue as some bizarre "AI" play. Shit is getting real weird around here.
> These clowns want $2500 goddamned american dollars for the privilege of reading their bloviations on this topic, which i absolutely will not pay.
You aren’t the target market for their “bloviations” - they are targeted at executives, and it isn’t like the executive pays this out of their own pocket, there is a budget and it comes out of the budget. Plus these reports generally aren’t aimed at technical people with significant pre-existing understanding of the field, their audience is more “I’m expected to make decisions about this topic but they didn’t cover it in my MBA”, or even “I need some convincing-sounding talking points to put in my slides for the board meeting, and if I cite an outside analyst they can’t argue with that”
Commonly with these reports a company buys a copy and then it can be freely shared within the company. Also $2,500 is likely just the list price and if you are a regular customer you’ll get a discount, or even find you’ve already paid for this report as part of some kind of subscription
Anyone prioritizing this nerfed, mindless dogshit over what their team is telling them and what's going on in the world around them is both an incompetent leader and a total idiot
A lot of the people paying for these analyst firm reports are sales people-so they can pass them on to their customers/prospects (to legally do that you often have to pay extra for “redistribution rights”)… and then the customer/prospect gets to read it for free
Who might not have much of an engineering team, or not one with relevant expertise… and why should they trust the vendor’s engineering team? If they are about to sign a contract for $$$, being able to find support for it in an independent analyst report can psychologically help a lot in the sales cycle
While the most useful reports for sales are those which directly compare products, like Gartner Magic Quadrant or Forrester Wave - a powerful tool if you come out on top - these kind of more background reports can help if the sales challenge is less “whose product should I buy?” and more “do I even need one of these products? should we be investing money in this?”
This sort of thing is why nobody gives a shit about IBM anymore and they have to keep just buying relevant companies to stay relevant.
Hopefully they do the right thing and hand hashicorp over to Redhat so they can open source the shit out of it. So they can do things like make OpenTofu the proper upstream for it, etc.
Every time ChatGPT outputs a Dockerfile, it counts as a cloud native application, right? :)
Did you intend to reference "It's a wonderful life?" When I read your comment I imagine a tiny child in Jimmy Stewart's arms, exclaiming the joys of capitalism ;-)
No but that's a funny coincidence :)
Who the heck is IDC's customer base, exactly? $2,500 for that, or $7,500 for this one about – drumroll, please – feature flags!
"Modern digital businesses need to be able to adapt to changing end-user demand, and since feature flags decouple release from deployment, it provides a good solution for improving software development velocity and business agility," said Jim Mercer, program vice president of IDC Software Development DevOps and DevSecOps. "Further, feature flags can help derisk releases, enable product experimentation, and allow for targeting and personalizing end-user experiences."
https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US52763824
Something I always respected in Americans is their talent for making money from absolutely nothing, providing zero or negative value in the process of doing so. Obviously doesn't apply to everyone, but you have more than a fair share of these people.
Only in america: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ponzi
Relatively few IDC clients are paying retail for single reports other than reprint rights. They're clients with broad employee access to events and reports in various areas. Had access for many years and, yes, having (supposedly validated) data is more or less essential for lots of presentations and other types of documents because, otherwise, your claims are viewed as pulling stuff out of you rear end.
So if you just point to something an IDC - analyst? has pulled of their rear end... is alright? ;-)
> more or less essential for lots of presentations and other types of documents
Wait. What? This reminds me of the trope of the "wikipedia citation" in high school and college.. that move was worth at most a C+. Are you seriously saying these fucks actually seriously cite this bullshit? In this day and age where even crowdsourced wiki articles seem "credible"? What the actual fuck? I hate this shit.
I'm clearly in the wrong field.
The analyst biz doesn't actually pay especially well--at least compared to big SV-based companies.
Yeah but I could make this shit up in like.. 15-20min/mo vs working for a living like a normal human person. I'm just imagining the sheer number of vertical feet of skiing I'm missing out on and seeing red.
Sad!
So, what is the practical TL;DR for everyone who isn't neither an employee nor investor? Hashicorp kinda made a lot of significant stuff, but that stuff is mostly FOSS and the commercial product is very niche. I am kinda surprised IBM even bought it, because it isn't very clear to me, how commercializeable this stuff is. So what does it mean? Will IBM most likely kill some FOSS products? Is this even possible? Were, say, terraform or nomad developed mostly by internal devs, or is there a solid enough community already to keep up with development or simply fork the tool if things go south?
The consolidation of power and IP into just several tech companies is worrying to me. Having the misfortune of working at IBM for just a few months, IBM leadership will give it the RedHat treatment. The dinosaurs at IBM will shelve their IP, and sell it for parts. Maybe Bloodmoar will buy up the rest and squeeze whatever remaining profit from acquisition.
If given the chance, just take the exit rather than trying to integrate into IBM.
>IBM leadership will give it the RedHat treatment. The dinosaurs at IBM will shelve their IP, and sell it for parts.
As someone working at Red Hat since before the acquisition, this does not match my experience of "the Red Hat treatment" even a little bit.
I don't doubt that they've handled acquisitions badly in the past but they did a decent job leaving us alone.
Biggest change I've seen is the intranet page now has an option to use IBM's single sign on in addition to RH's single sign on.
Well, darn.
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