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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.)
But I had a similar experience like yours with PHP, I just couldn't get into it.
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.
Most staff with no equity will leave quickly of course, so the invalidity of non compete will definitely help those souls.
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].
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.
We're just starting to implement it and we've only heard good things about it.
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.
There's probably an alternate reality where something like HashiStack became this generation's vSphere, and HashiCorp stayed independent and profitable.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-closes-la...
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-releases-first-quarter-re...
Additionally, you don't need the full purchase price in cash to buy the company. You can do leveraged buyouts, etc.
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.
I think they can find a few billions lying around, without having to turn the sofa cushions.
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.
