[HN Gopher] Mitchell reflects as he departs HashiCorp
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Mitchell reflects as he departs HashiCorp
Author : manojlds
Score : 662 points
Date : 2023-12-14 21:27 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hashicorp.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hashicorp.com)
| fishnchips wrote:
| Drop the "Hashi". Just Corp. It's cleaner.
|
| Jokes aside, it's an end of an era. Mitchell has always been one
| of my role models both as an amazing engineer and a really
| decent, humble human being. I'm really looking forward to other
| amazing things he's going to build.
| teeray wrote:
| CorpyCorp could work
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| CorpyMcCorpFace
| candiddevmike wrote:
| ExVMwareCorp may work.
| __float wrote:
| What do you mean by this?
| leetrout wrote:
| Lots of VMWare folks came over to Hashi over the years.
| ergocoder wrote:
| Or change it to ArmonCorp to balance it out.
| password4321 wrote:
| Is there any one individual or group responsible for HashiCorp's
| switch to BSL?
|
| From what I saw Mitchell let go of running the company and now
| that HashiCorp is not so cool anymore it's time to get out.
| echelon wrote:
| They built a ton of value, were unable to capitalize on it
| (just like early Docker), and when they tried to capture the
| value of the thing they built it pissed off the open source
| ecosystem (and all the profitable companies) built on top.
|
| They should have thought about this a long, long time ago.
|
| I feel for the smaller companies, but I feel for big companies
| that come in and plunder because of open license terms.
| fangorn wrote:
| I recently concocted a (conspiracy) theory that relicensing
| of HC projects is a ploy to get IBM (or some other company
| happy to rain on IBM's parade) to finally make an offer.
| Mitchell leaving the company features in the theory as well.
| Basically it seems like since at least 2021 HC leadership
| and/or investors are exploring exit strategies that will
| bring in the beeeelions.
| tbcj wrote:
| That tracks. IBM acquiring Hashicorp was a persistent rumor
| I heard during my last year at IBM (timing was not long
| after the Red Hat acquisition).
| aeyes wrote:
| Hashicorp is a public company so the theory doesn't make
| much sense to me. The execs and early investors already
| made their money.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| They've been for sale since pre-IPO. Cisco almost bought
| them.
| asmor wrote:
| The thing is, Terraform Cloud could've been good, but it's
| not. And now it prices a K8S cluster the same as a DNS
| record. (and both too high for glorified object storage)
|
| And Vault Enterprise could've been something I can justify to
| my EM to to ensure it continues to exist (and get namespaces
| and slow support as a bonus). But they asked way too much.
|
| It also doesn't help they started prioritizing bugs almost
| solely based on support contracts, even trivial fixes you
| submit don't get merged for months to years.
|
| They built products and thought everything else would just
| fall into place. And unfortunately it doesn't.
| jdwithit wrote:
| I've never personally used paid Vault but what you said,
| that they "asked way too much" is the constant refrain I've
| heard about it. Much like Splunk, it seems like there's an
| extra zero on the quote for smaller use cases.
|
| Employees gotta eat, I don't begrudge them trying to sell
| the software. But it seems like they went for the
| Lamborghini business model when maybe what the market was
| looking for was Honda.
| voytec wrote:
| > Is there any one individual or group responsible for
| HashiCorps switch to BSL?
|
| IBM, would you choose to trust statements[1] posted from a
| throwaway account
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38579504
| jdwithit wrote:
| Clicking "parent" on this post a couple times yields some
| more context. Seems like the claim the throwaway account is
| making is that IBM pulling Vault into their IBM Cloud
| offering was the catalyst for relicensing everything.
| Terraform and other Hashi projects just got caught up in a
| blanket policy change.
|
| Had not heard the IBM angle before and spent a few minutes
| digging.
| emptysongglass wrote:
| This is totally non-credible. Their enterprise pricing was
| crazy for value and the feature-set slim. I personally was on
| a number of teams that refused to pay it and went with
| another player in the TACOS (Terraform Automation and
| COllaboration Software) family.
|
| The TACOS provided way more features at a sane price point.
| They were out-competed by their own cottage industry and the
| BSL was their weapon to solve it. Surprise, surprise it
| backfired.
|
| I respect Mitchell for the competent programmer he is but as
| a founder, he should have stepped in and done something to
| right the ship before it got this bad.
| gobins wrote:
| Looking forward to what Mitchell does next. I have always enjoyed
| reading his code, a fantastic role model.
| glenngillen wrote:
| This is what he's working on atm, including regular updates on
| progress: https://mitchellh.com/ghostty
| tiffanyh wrote:
| The sense I always got from the outside (I don't know him
| personally), is that Mitchell is just a really good engineer that
| wants to build great products.
|
| Nothing more.
|
| He's honest about what he's passionate about. Hence why he went
| from running the company to stepping back to being an IC.
|
| I've got a lot of respect for that.
|
| Below is his personal website, for those who haven't read his
| posts.
|
| https://mitchellh.com
| debarshri wrote:
| It is interesting to see how hashicorp went from an underdog
| company with vagrant to a company to aspire for with terraform,
| nomad, consul, vault to something that orgs and community dread,
| all within a decade.
|
| Standards that they have set are still industry wide relevant.
| But you can see they are on a negative path.
| jen20 wrote:
| This is a weird take. If anything, Nomad, Consul and Vault are
| on the ascent, as the realities of the CNCF ecosystem set in
| for people with results to deliver.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| The BSL licensing thing has turned off a lot of the more
| hobbyist/tinkerer-centric users who really rocketed
| HashiCorp's products up the ladder in their orgs.
|
| It's a bit like Elasticsearch, I think--it's gotten big
| enough it won't be a quick death, but I don't see Hashi's
| products growing/dominating as much now as I did a couple
| years ago.
|
| (As an aside, I'd like to thank Mitchell for his work over
| the years, Vagrant especially was huge in my infrastructure
| work, and Terraform was a great companion to Ansible and
| CloudFormation as we automated more and more stuff.)
| ak217 wrote:
| It's true that the licensing change is a turnoff, but
| Terraform redefined an industry. What's the alternative?
|
| (I'm hoping Mitchell is going to have an answer to that)
| lawik wrote:
| It was forked. The OpenTofu variant seems to have
| backing. Used it yesterday.
| kkapelon wrote:
| Pulumi and Crossplane
|
| Or OpenTF if you want to same thing minus the licensing
| mess
| pas wrote:
| > Crossplane
|
| I tried to understand what is it, how it works, what is
| it good for, but ... never managed to. It still has the
| same "build control planes without needing to write code"
| on its website. okay, it says "orchestrate applications
| and infrastructure". that's at least makes sense when the
| context is Terraform and Pulumi.
|
| okay, in the quickstart the whole thing seems like code.
| but okay.
|
| ah, so you can use k8s CRDs to define cloud stuff (like
| S3 buckets and GCP GCS buckets and whatnot), not bad, but
| super verbose.
| kkapelon wrote:
| Pulumi -> Same end result as Terraform but you use Code
| (python, go, typescript) to describe resources instead of
| hcl
|
| Crossplane -> Same end result as Terraform but you use
| K8s resources in YAML to describe your infra.
|
| I hope that helps. But I agree that the
| crossplane/upbound marketing is super confusing.
| ak217 wrote:
| Thanks for noting these. From my experience, neither can
| replace terraform (though Pulumi might be on the right
| track). Neither come anywhere close to the Terraform AWS
| provider, and tightly coupling my IaC to Kubernetes is a
| non-starter for me (and I'm sure for many others as
| well).
| orthecreedence wrote:
| Anecdotally, I've started transitioning more stuff from
| Nomad/Consul to k8s after Hashicorp's licensing changes. I
| somehow doubt I'm the only one.
|
| Still happily using Vault for now, though.
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Still happily using Vault for now, though.
|
| You should switch to OpenBAO.
| fishnchips wrote:
| Based on my limited experience Vault is actually becoming a
| niche tool. Big cloud players have been offering more limited
| solutions that are good enough for many if not most use
| cases. A few years ago as a consultant I'd unconditionally
| recommend Vault to my clients. If I were consulting today,
| I'd first ask what are they missing from KMS and Secrets
| Manager.
| fud101 wrote:
| KMS? Secrets manager? Are those offered by a particular
| vendor or what
| Aeolun wrote:
| Yeah, they're AWS secrets management services.
| fishnchips wrote:
| Yes, these two are AWS terms, but other clouds have
| nearly the same services, and often called the same, too.
| imglorp wrote:
| Yes but if you want to be multi-cloud and not have to
| integrate with each cloud's secret storage API, you would
| do it once for Vault and bring it with you to each cloud.
| xyzzy123 wrote:
| Probably I just work at more dysfunctional places than
| you, but:
|
| If I'm building product for on prem I'd prefer to use env
| vars or k8s secrets and let the customer integrate their
| preferred secrets manager. Also helpful when you run
| sales POCs where ease of getting to splash page really
| matters.
|
| Building inside enterprise, I've never actually had to
| support multiple clouds for the same component but if it
| ever comes up and I have any sort of choice in the matter
| I would probably rather template 3 native secrets
| integrations than deal with the special circle of hell
| that is enterprise-managed Vault or CyberArk.
| prmoustache wrote:
| The reality is you will never use a common secret storage
| anyway as usually and even when using multi-cloud tools
| like terraform you write a lot of cloud vendor specific
| stuff because they do not share the same provider. So
| using different secret storage API is not a huge deal and
| pretty much a moot point.
|
| Also my vision of multi-cloud in large org hasn't been
| that a particular product/app or team was ever using
| multiple clouds. My experience is that large orgs like to
| have multi-cloud support because they grow by acquiring
| other companies regardless of which cloud vendor they are
| using so you just want to provide standards and templates
| for everyone. Obviously said templates will be usually
| cloud vendor specifics.
| fishnchips wrote:
| Even when going multi-cloud you can employ different
| strategies. Vault is definitely one of them, but you can
| also use federation to exchange one cloud's credentials
| for another's, giving you the ability to centralize
| secrets in one of them. You can use a layer of
| abstraction like GoCloud [0]. You can also build for each
| cloud separately and decide either not to centralize
| secrets at all, or build some trivial bespoke tooling to
| synchronize some of them. I'm not endorsing any of the
| options, nor am I trying to argue that Vault is never the
| right choice, I'm just pointing out that Vault isn't the
| only viable alternative.
|
| https://github.com/google/go-cloud
| aetimmes wrote:
| Nomad is dead in the water.
|
| When you talk to Consul support engineers, they assume you're
| using kubernetes, and are confused if you tell them you're
| using Nomad, _a product that their company makes_.
| demizer wrote:
| Nomad will be there when managed k8s gets too expensive. I
| was looking at it seriously last year for on prem. I
| chickend put bcz I didn't want to be the only person on my
| team that understood it. We still don't have a solution,
| but nomad will be there for when we are ready to progress,
| regardless of the license.
| asmor wrote:
| Why would managed k8s get more expensive?
| jen20 wrote:
| Complexity. Monetary is not the only (or even primary)
| form of expense.
| sofixa wrote:
| > I chickend put bcz I didn't want to be the only person
| on my team that understood it.
|
| There are online courses for free and paid courses
| (online and in person) so if they have the desire to
| learn, you won't be the only person.
| danw1979 wrote:
| It's not really. For a long time their products were open
| source, free to use and widely adopted by the tinkering
| masses. Now the company has shareholders, is chasing the big
| juicy enterprise customers and has a pricing structure that
| would make Oracle blush (hyperbole, but still...).
|
| It's a different beast than the company Mitchell founded and
| that HN knew and loved, that's all.
| m1keil wrote:
| Honestly feels a bit like the end of another great company - Chef
| (Adam Jacob). Great tooling, built with great engineers but
| business realities forced it to take some unfortunate turns.
|
| I hope Hashicorp will manage to find its stride and not end up as
| some bullet point in a long "solutions" portfolio of some
| software conglomerate.
|
| And thank you Mitchell for all the work. Can't wait to see what
| is coming next from you.
| lamroger wrote:
| Forgot about Chef... Good times...
| mdaniel wrote:
| I can't speak to the "great company" part but Adam (and co's)
| current endeavor may interest you:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
|
| tl;dr = https://github.com/systeminit/si#readme
| m1keil wrote:
| Yep, I am following them already. Cheers! :)
| revskill wrote:
| No mention about what's next ? Hm, why.
| jethronethro wrote:
| Doubt there's anything sinister or shady about that. Maybe he
| doesn't have any plans. Or maybe he just doesn't feel like
| sharing those plans or doesn't feel obliged to share them.
| revskill wrote:
| My guess (could be wrong): He no longer enjoy writing Go.
| brcmthrowaway wrote:
| Something AI related no doubt
| pphysch wrote:
| He's been working hard on a really cool modern terminal
| emulator the last couple years, among other things I'm sure.
|
| https://mitchellh.com/ghostty
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Kids are a thing that can be next.
| fb03 wrote:
| My suspicion is that he simply might spend some time with his
| newborn and enjoy life a bit after such a wild streak. He has
| more than enough financial resources to do that comfortably.
|
| He has stressed twice in the post that most of his life
| revolved around that company - Maybe it's time for that not to
| be anymore - simply put.
| cgopalan wrote:
| Mitchell is the only person I can think of who went through the
| cycle of tinkerer/IC -> founder -> CXO and then back to IC in his
| own company. Also, his writings on Zig has been tremendously
| helpful for someone like me who is curious about it. Huge respect
| from a fellow IC!
| kfrane wrote:
| The only other person I remember doing that is
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Walker_(programmer)
|
| Btw. he published a great read on how they started Autodesk
| https://www.fourmilab.ch/autofile/e5/
| cgopalan wrote:
| That's great to know. Thanks!
| jacquesm wrote:
| John Walker is also very impressive, definitely rates a
| mention. And I'll forever owe him because of Speak Freely.
| HatchedLake721 wrote:
| IC?
| hazzamanic wrote:
| Individual contributor
| bitwrangler wrote:
| Independent Consultant (my guess)
| andrelaszlo wrote:
| Integrated Circuit. Insatiable Craving. Irrevocable Crust.
| Indifferent Creator. Ignatios of Constantinople. Instigating
| Crime. Irritating C**. Individual Contributor. Your guess is
| as good as mine!
| SOLAR_FIELDS wrote:
| It's standard big corp parlance for a role that has no
| direct reports. Obvious terminology for anyone who has
| worked in an org with a moderate size HR or higher, but
| anyone else has probably never heard of it. I knew
| immediately that it meant Individual Contributor but I can
| easily see someone not knowing it if have never worked in
| BigCorp
| cgopalan wrote:
| Sorry, thought it was a fairly familiar acronym. IC =
| individual contributor.
| hadlock wrote:
| It's extremely familiar. No need to apologize.
| epolanski wrote:
| Where can I find these writings?
| cgopalan wrote:
| On his website: https://mitchellh.com/zig
| madarcho wrote:
| At Unity, Joachim Ante always stayed very close to the
| underlying engine and its tech, rather than the broader market
| strategies and moves. Of course, every situation is unique and
| difficult to compare 1:1.
| mitchellh wrote:
| We've gone full circle! I originally launched Vagrant here on HN
| in 2010, which was at the top of HN very briefly for the day. Now
| here I am 14 years later witnessing my departure post in that
| very same spot. A strange experience! Thanks for the support over
| the years. A lot of the initial community for the projects I
| helped start came from here.
| awsanswers wrote:
| I built a career following in your vision. Thank you 1000x
| philbert101 wrote:
| Well deserved Mitchel! Thank you for Vagrant, Packer, Consul,
| Vault and Terraform, all of which I used back in my DevOps
| days.
| leetrout wrote:
| Congratulations, Mitchell!
|
| Many accomplishments and the ability to change an entire
| industry. One of a kind!
|
| Can't wait to see what else you get up to.
| jtreminio wrote:
| My first major foss was heavily based around Vagrant (PuPHPet).
| It was a joy building on top of your tooling to make web
| engineers lives easier.
|
| Thank you for your work, it was great while it lasted!
| ezekg wrote:
| Some of my first OSS work was also based on Vagrant
| (https://github.com/ezekg/tj). I eventually turned that into
| a commercial desktop app, built on top of that CLI project.
| Ultimately, the project didn't work out, but it was a big
| step in my open source and entrepreneurial journey.
|
| ty, mitchellh!
| conradfr wrote:
| PuPHPet was very useful, I started many projects with it.
|
| I actually still have some projects with a Vagrant VM based
| on it that I have to move to docker compose or something.
| jamestimmins wrote:
| Congrats on what you've accomplished here. Building an
| industry-standard company and then carefully planning your exit
| on your own terms is a huge win.
|
| I (selfishly) hope whatever is next is still hacker adjacent,
| bc your work has been a big inspiration to a lot of us. Best of
| luck to you!
| ezekg wrote:
| > I (selfishly) hope whatever is next is still hacker
| adjacent, bc your work has been a big inspiration to a lot of
| us. Best of luck to you!
|
| You should check out the terminal he's been working on
| codenamed Ghostty [0].
|
| [0]: https://mitchellh.com/ghostty
| ChatGTP wrote:
| _Note: Ghostty is still a private project. I plan to open
| source it one day and share it with more people but for now
| this is a private personal project. If you are really
| interested in helping with the project, please feel free to
| email me, but no promises!_
| fb03 wrote:
| Thank you for all your hard work, man!
| jackson-mcd wrote:
| Congrats!
| sytse wrote:
| Congrats on all your accomplishments Mitchell and looking
| forward to what you'll create next.
| gigapotential wrote:
| Congrats! You've Terraformed the industry!
| denysvitali wrote:
| Thanks for everything! I can't wait to see what you'll do next!
|
| You and Armon have truly shaped the world of infrastructure
| with your tools and ideas. Although we never met in person (I
| only had the pleasure to meet Armon so far) - we've interacted
| a couple of times through some PRs and I really like you as an
| engineer. It's incredible the value that you created over these
| 11 years - not only on the product side of things (Terraform
| and Vault are incredible!), but also with all of your Go
| packages. The amount of time your name pops up in my go.mod
| files is just impressive :)
|
| You and Armon are incredible engineers and I'm so happy you
| built something as cool as Hashicorp! All the best with the
| next chapter of your life!
| umur wrote:
| Congrats Mitchell! Thanks for all your great work, and best of
| luck for what's ahead.
| Laconicus wrote:
| Back to hacking Neopets?
|
| -Iridium
| V-eHGsd_ wrote:
| let's go flying
| dylanz wrote:
| I remember hacking on the same Ruby projects as you, then
| running into you the same way in the Erlang world. Man, that
| was almost 15 years ago! You've built some awesome stuff along
| the way... congrats, and keep hackin'!!
| pmyjavec wrote:
| I remember getting my first commit into Packer, you review,
| approved and merged it. It was one of the best days of my
| (fairly early) coding life because I think your work is amazing
| and I was so happy to contribute something back.
|
| Thanks for all the amazing work thus far!
| cacois wrote:
| Followed your work since that launch - thanks for everything!
| Enjoy your family and find some new fun things to explore.
| ksec wrote:
| Just the Link. It all started here.
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901
|
| Vagrant: A tool for building and distributing virtual
| development environments (vagrantup.com) 129 points by
| mitchellh on March 8, 2010 | hide | past | favorite | 28
| comments
|
| I still remember reading that post on HN. And subsequently
| Vagrant took off. Cant believe it is nearly 14 years! Thank You
| Mitchell for everything as I am (still) using Vagrant. First
| Child is always going to be a hectic job beyond comprehension.
| Hopefully you will have more free time to play with Zig and may
| be even Crystal once your child grows a little more. Best of
| Luck.
|
| Edit: I guess HN momentarily went down due to this announcement
| on front page.
| antupis wrote:
| Is there somewhere a list of these big stuff that launched in
| the HN, eg this and Dropbox
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8863 .
| ksec wrote:
| Another big one on top of my head is Coinbase
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3754664
| romanhn wrote:
| PagerDuty: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=758653
| nonameiguess wrote:
| This is great to read now and reflect on where they
| eventually went in the next 13 years. The basic questions
| "why Chef" and "why Virtual Box" and so on with requests to
| support other hypervisors and provisioning tools. Now Packer
| and Terraform provision and deploy machines to damn near any
| platform using damn near any provisioning tool, but neither
| Mitchell himself nor the HashiCorp team in general had to
| learn all of those tools and platforms. Instead, they
| provided orchestration systems that allow for a common
| configuration language and execution model but delegate the
| logic of how to use the APIs of specific platforms and
| provisioners to plugins. Seed the ecosystem with plugins
| representing the most common platforms and toolchains your
| company is already familiar with and extend from there to
| stuff you either figure out later or let the community
| contribute.
|
| This feels like open source and community creation at its
| best. It's why GNU/Linux systems did what they did. A bunch
| of professors and hackers tried to clean-room recreate Unix
| but never finished the kernel. Meanwhile, some grad student
| made a kernel but no userspace. Then some entirely different
| teams put these together along with a package manager,
| installer, and remote filesystems users could fetch ISOs and
| packages from, and finally you've got a usable system that
| didn't require a beast the size of Microsoft to do everything
| in-house. None of them could have done it alone.
|
| It also makes the events of the past year kind of poignant. I
| see a lot of commenters talking about HashiCorp needing the
| license change to capture the value of what they created and
| not allow other companies to siphon it off. But isn't that
| the point of civilization? We all stand on the shoulders of
| giants. We generally don't want the first person to come up
| with an idea and their direct descendants to be the only
| people who ever profit off of that idea. That's aristocracy.
| Mitchell is a billionaire, isn't he? None of Linus Torvalds,
| Richard Stallman, or Ian Murdoch ever became billionaires,
| but they weren't exactly starving in the street, either.
| Exactly how much value does a single person need to capture?
| It's the community we want to see thrive, isn't it? Not just
| our single company. Every employee of that company can work
| elsewhere if they need to and every investor has other
| investments. They aren't going to starve either if the
| company someday stops growing.
|
| I get not wanting the Amazons and Googles of the world to
| take open source inputs and put them into proprietary
| sinkholes where further innovation gets stuck inside of a
| single company. But isn't that the point of the GPL? Anything
| they add they also have to give back. You don't need BUSL for
| that.
| subomi wrote:
| Congrats Mitchell, you've been a huge inspiration!
| jacquesm wrote:
| You're one of the very few technical people that made it big
| that I continue to look up to. Congratulations on your
| achievements, and looking forward to whatever is in the
| pipeline.
| thecleaner wrote:
| Man you're a rocket ship. Such an inspiration and
| congratulations on your success.
| ashvardanian wrote:
| Congratulations on a new page in your journey! And thank you
| for documenting the story - you've inspired many great
| developers and founders along the way!
|
| Being on almost the opposite end of the software design, I
| haven't yet had a good place to apply the tools you've built,
| but I've heard many nice things about them from practically
| everyone, including direct competitors. That says it all.
| ricardbejarano wrote:
| Just wanna say thank you for all your hard work!
| DiabloD3 wrote:
| Now you get to work on your terminal fulltime now ;)
| rickette wrote:
| Thanks! You made quite an impact establishing all those
| projects.
| gyre007 wrote:
| Incredible run! Thanks for all the tools you've given us. But
| more importantly all the relentless passion for automation has
| been very inspiring! Chapeau, sir! All the best in whats next
| for you.
| elAhmo wrote:
| Good luck and thanks for everything! It is very hard to make
| such a big impact on millions of developers and companies
| around the world like you did.
| bg24 wrote:
| Big fan of your products (Vagrant, Terraform, Vault, Consul).
| Thank you for the amazing contributions to the community. Best
| wishes.
| tupilaq wrote:
| I once (March 2014) emailed hashicorp to retrieve a lost
| vagrant licence key. I got a direct reply from you Mitchell
| with instructions on what to do. Blew my tiny mind, those were
| rare bygone days in our industry.
|
| Thank you for all you've created.
| jcims wrote:
| In 1992 I replied to an email from Steve Jobs that was
| shipped in the default email client of the NeXT workstation I
| was using. I checked the 'read receipt' box in the client. He
| replied, ignoring my question and berating me for violating
| his privacy by using the read receipt feature.
| pantulis wrote:
| > He replied, ignoring my question and berating me for
| violating his privacy by using the read receipt feature.
|
| Sounds totally legit!
| pid-1 wrote:
| Good luck! Consul, Terraform and Nomad were pivotal for my
| carrier. Went from a server unboxer to a container wizard
| during the last decade. Thanks a lot!
| berniedurfee wrote:
| Congratulations Mitchell! You've inspired and influenced the
| careers of many, many developers, including me.
|
| I always look to HashiCorp first when searching for tooling.
| Always something interesting coming out of that shop.
| rossta wrote:
| I remember meeting you at a DC Ruby conference after a talk you
| gave on middleware as a design concept. This was years ago, in
| the early days of Vagrant I think. Amazing to see how much
| you've accomplished since then. Congrats on your achievements
| and best of luck with your future hacking!
| mlrtime wrote:
| Just want to say thank you, from a engineer who in 2010
| kickstarted a career by using vagrant to create reproducible
| dev environments.
| rkrzr wrote:
| Thank you for all the great products that you have created!
| Your vision on infrastructure has always been inspiring to me
| and you are one of the few engineers who has truly moved the
| field as a whole forward.
| wenbin wrote:
| I've been using Vagrant for ~10 years, on a daily basis!
|
| Thank you, @mitchellh !
| ryanlitalien wrote:
| Congratulations! I was an early Vagrant user, it helped
| immensely, thank you!
| mugivarra69 wrote:
| terraform move killed it
| nodesocket wrote:
| I use HashiCorp software nearly daily and think Terraform was the
| biggest eureka! moments for me. I've held HashiCorp since the
| IPO... Hasn't gone as planned so far, but holding on. Honestly, I
| expect an acquisition like Slack (just my hunch).
| danielhlockard wrote:
| Hey Mitchell,
|
| Best of luck in the future! I'm a nobody - but I was around in
| the packer days and wrote a post-processor and terraform provider
| for our vsphere back in the day. I don't think I'd be where I am
| now without those experiences. Thanks!
| x86x87 wrote:
| Mitchell is an amazing human being. Met him in the hacking
| section of a conference and he was just this down to earth,
| really laid back dude. He was hanging out with us basically
| random people and didn't once bring up who he was and what he
| worked on.
| BobBagwill wrote:
| Enjoy your family. Have fun. <ET>Beee goood!</ET>
| beoberha wrote:
| Vagrant is such an awesome tool. It's been about a decade since
| I've used it in any capacity, but remember being wowed in my
| first internship when I could just spin up a VM like nothing.
| Best of luck, Mitchell!
| faeyanpiraat wrote:
| What are you using instead of Vagrant for the same use case?
| pantulis wrote:
| Aren't kids using Docker for that stuff these days?
| nuker wrote:
| Just a side thought, with all due respect:
|
| > The controversial worldviews such as multi-cloud that we
| founded this company on are now mainstream and broadly accepted.
|
| Emm .. no. It is not mainstream. Multi-cloud may be forced choice
| for some regulated fintech, but no sane project will double the
| infra codebase just to get from "lock-in". I see no other
| benefits. And double the codebase is quadruple the bugs. This is
| main Terraform's sales pitch, and it has to die. IMHO.
| acdha wrote:
| So I kind of agree that most projects don't need multi cloud
| but any enterprise will have a bunch of different things which
| can be managed by Terraform. There is real value in being able
| to use the same tool to manage AWS/GCP/Azure/etc., Cloudflare,
| GitLab, VMware, and even racks of Cisco kit in the basement.
|
| If you're doing it that way, you avoid most of those multicloud
| drawbacks because you're using the full native functionality,
| not building abstraction layers or racking up technical debt by
| sticking with the lowest common denominator.
| nuker wrote:
| > There is real value in being able to use the same tool to
| manage AWS/GCP/Azure/etc., Cloudflare, GitLab, VMware
|
| My bad, I did not define meaning of multi-cloud. I meant
| using AWS and GCP at the same time, doing mostly the same
| things, for redundancy and no lock-in.
|
| Still I prefer native IaaC tools, it is simpler, faster and
| more reliable. I'm AWS guy, so Cloudformation for all things
| infra. It irks me when I see Terraform doing AWS infra. I
| jump in to rewrite it as first matter of business, lol
| acdha wrote:
| Heh, I have mostly worked on AWS but we stopped using
| CloudFormation because the experience was so much worse
| than Terraform with the lengthy deploys, no diffs,
| significant time delays supporting new AWS features, and
| deadlocks. They've added diffs but turning debugging into a
| half hour or longer break is still a problem.
| nuker wrote:
| Another point - you can jump on AWS support to help you
| with Cloudformation. They'll wash their hands when its
| Terraform :)
|
| And chasing where the var value actually came from in TF
| drove me mad few times!
| acdha wrote:
| They also did that for Cloud Formation in my experience.
| It's better now that you can tell CF to forget about
| resources but I still get people asking for help dealing
| with a hung stack.
| leriksen wrote:
| That's not what he means when he says multi-cloud.
|
| He means his product supports multiple clouds, through
| terraforms providers, for example.
|
| Doing the same infra, across multiple clouds, is a different
| thing, it's not a Hashi thing.
| nuker wrote:
| > Doing the same infra, across multiple clouds, is a
| different thing, it's not a Hashi thing.
|
| Not sure about this. Here is what official site says:
|
| "Provisioning infrastructure across multiple clouds increases
| fault tolerance, allowing for more graceful recovery from
| cloud provider outages."
|
| https://www.terraform.io/use-cases/multi-cloud-deployment
| kkapelon wrote:
| Terraform supports different clouds but with completely
| different syntax. The marketing on the website just informs
| you what you can use any cloud you want. The message is
| against other tools such as cloud formation (AWS only) or
| GCM (Google only), ARM (Azure only) and so on.
|
| To give you an analogy it would be like Firefox saying that
| they are "multi-OS" meaning that you can install Firefox if
| you have Windows and you can install Firefox if you have
| Linux. It doesn't mean that you must/should have Linux and
| Windows at the same time as a user.
| jen20 wrote:
| Strictly incorrect. The syntax is the same for every
| cloud - either HCL2 or JSON. What you are calling syntax
| is actually the resource model. Every project which
| claims to bridge this resource model ends up implementing
| a lowest common denominator time sink which doesn't stand
| up to basic scrutiny.
|
| Your analogy also does not demonstrate whatever it is you
| seem to think it does - Firefox is indeed multi-OS.
| kkapelon wrote:
| It is ok. Parent already said that that they mean
| something different with "multi-cloud"
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38649796
| jen20 wrote:
| The definition of multi-cloud does not matter when
| talking about what syntax is.
| nuker wrote:
| > The marketing on the website just informs you what you
| can use any cloud you want.
|
| Disagree. The message says "fault tolerance", meaning you
| deploy same things in different clouds. Which brings back
| to my original post - TF does not help with this, as
| jen20 said - very different resource models.
| lijok wrote:
| Multi-cloud doesn't mean you duplicate your infra deployment
| across multiple cloud platforms for redundancy. It means you
| integrate the best features of each cloud to run your stack.
| Cloudflare for cdn, GCP for load balancing, aws for compute,
| snowflake for big data, etc etc... It is absolutely mainstream.
| dikei wrote:
| > Cloudflare for cdn, GCP for load balancing, aws for compute
|
| Isn't this cause you to pay twice the already expensive
| Egress fee ?
| purpleidea wrote:
| Congrats on leaving! The thing I always most respected about
| Mitchell was that he was actually often coding. So many "leaders"
| these days, are all talk and no action or skill. Maybe they had
| some git commits once upon a time, but I always felt like
| Mitchell was always coding throughout. Too bad what happened with
| the licensing stuff at the company though.
| abkolan wrote:
| > Too bad what happened with the licensing stuff at the company
| though.
|
| OOTL here. What happened?
| purpleidea wrote:
| They switched to a proprietary license for all their
| products. Their CEO said some stuff in an interview. Their
| stock is plummeting.
|
| Check online yourself. Disclaimer, I am the author of a
| similar tool: https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/
| tekknolagi wrote:
| https://hackernoon.com/open-source-is-dead-understanding-
| the...
| TheRealPomax wrote:
| Title should probably be "Mitchell Hashimoto reflects as he
| departs HashiCorp". Lots of folks have no idea who "Mitchell" is
| without that key extra bit.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Hashicorp was always a role model for open source companies.
| Congratulations for that era. You achieved something impressive.
| thrillgore wrote:
| Key word is "was."
| scoot wrote:
| > the GitHub Octoverse report found that HashiCorp Configuration
| Language (HCL) has once again emerged as one of the top languages
| used in open source projects
|
| "Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) with a 56,1% increase in
| popularity is the fastest-growing language according to GitHub"
|
| Fastest growing and "top" are _not_ the same thing, but I have to
| assume that you know that @mitchellh. Embarrassed for you.
|
| https://xkcd.com/1102/
| raphlinus wrote:
| From the 2023 Octoverse report[1], "In 2023, Shell and
| Hashicorp Configuration Language (HCL) once again emerged as
| top languages across open source projects, indicating that
| operations and IaC work are gaining prominence in the open
| source space." The accompanying chart shows it as #11, ranking
| above Dart, Kotlin, and Ruby.
|
| I think this is a case where the citation bears out the claim,
| and there's no need for Mitchell to feel embarrassment.
|
| [1]: https://github.blog/2023-11-08-the-state-of-open-source-
| and-...
| scoot wrote:
| Ah, thanks. I get to be embarrassed instead! I'll take it.
| ludwigvan wrote:
| 'You either die a hero or live long enough to see yourself become
| the villain...'
|
| Great that Mitchell evaded that fate by getting out of the
| leadership before controversial moves by Hashicorp started
| occurring. His legacy will be untainted.
| thekevinwang wrote:
| Legend
| issafram wrote:
| Guy left and Terraform still has horrible logging
| yuppie_scum wrote:
| TF plans seem pretty clean to me
| thrillgore wrote:
| Congratulations on your exit. OpenTofu will continue the work you
| started.
| nanmu42 wrote:
| Out of topic but I can't help to notice the og:image of the web
| page is 57 MiB. https://www.datocms-
| assets.com/2885/1702507860-mitchell-hc19...
| klysm wrote:
| I believe the idiomatic term would be "off topic" :)
| nkko wrote:
| DatoCMS uses imgix and resizes based on the URLs params. If
| they haven't implemented that in the frontend layout then .
| thecleaner wrote:
| Can we all take a moment to reflect how great is HN ? People have
| launched their software products here and gone on to become
| wildly successful or industry standards. I think our field is
| lucky we have a space where we can all enjoy people's successes,
| get inspired, be sourly or sarcastic (lol), have meaningful
| discussions and its all done with Lisp, HTML tables, an unstyled
| "add comment" button (please don't change) and a bunch of bare-
| metal servers which sometimes catch fire along with the
| discussions. Its quite wonderful.
| prmoustache wrote:
| I can't help to read Mitchell's post as a "I am jumping of the
| boat before it sinks!"
| sverhagen wrote:
| Would've found it really cool, had he somehow acknowledged the
| current upheaval. That said, I'm buying into the story that
| this was the plan all along. The breadcrumbs were there, from
| well before the licensing trouble.
| cies wrote:
| Their two most prominent project Terraform and Vault (as listed
| in first position on their won website) were recently forked:
|
| https://opentofu.org/
|
| https://www.techtarget.com/searchitoperations/news/366563095...
|
| Their other offerings have very strong alternatives.
|
| I use Terraform and will certainly consider going with OpenTofu
| in the next upgrade.
| s0l1dsnak3123 wrote:
| I got really excited about Consul when I read about it here many
| years ago. I wrote a ruby library for it
| (https://github.com/WeAreFarmGeek/diplomat) which became rather
| popular, and was used by quite a few large organisations.
| Hashicorp sent me a care package to thank me - a T-shirt and a
| card signed by Mitchell himself - I wore that T-Shirt until it
| was threadbare and I still have the card. Its a small thing on
| the grand scale of things, but it's something I look back on with
| pride.
|
| Well done to the Hashicorp team for getting to where they are now
| - by building something new and useful, and by fundamentally not
| being greedy.
| pas wrote:
| is this the same team that got greedy recently - which then
| lead to forking Terraform - or there's been some personnel
| changes?
| hendry wrote:
| Mitchell feels like the exception that proves the rule, the rule
| being that there are very few engineers turned entrepreneurs that
| are successful & balanced.
| guappa wrote:
| Is he successful if the company is doing so bad?
| hendry wrote:
| https://ir.hashicorp.com/news-releases/news-release-
| details/...
|
| Hashicorp seems to be doing alright to me. Don't look at the
| stock price.
| guappa wrote:
| I've never once in my life used something from hashicorp and
| thought it wasn't badly designed.
|
| Only reason I've used them is because someone at work set it up
| and left.
| totallywrong wrote:
| Thanks for the overall contribution to the space, IaC has
| definitely come a long way. But man don't ever give us another
| HCL please!
| ghthor wrote:
| HCL is great, no scoping issues, easy to read and write, great
| auto format support, easy to incorporate into a go program(and
| extend with functions). I pick it up very consistently and am
| happy every time; while each time I have to write YAML I die
| inside.
| DLarsen wrote:
| I remember near the start of HashiCorp, Mitchell and I spoke
| about buying one of his side projects. In seeking to rustle up
| some funds, friends asked me why anyone would offload a
| profitable project at such a price. Mitchell essentially
| explained that he was moving on to focus on bigger and better
| things. Boy was he right.
|
| Someone else beat me to the punch on buying the website, but
| Mitchell's clarity of purpose was profound.
| aemadrid wrote:
| Thanks Mitchell for all the fish. Loved what you have done and
| can't wait to see what you come up with next.
| aemadrid wrote:
| Thanks for the fish Mitchell. Love what you have done and can't
| wait for what you will do next.
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