[HN Gopher] Cisco to acquire Isovalent
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Cisco to acquire Isovalent
Author : ABS
Score : 124 points
Date : 2023-12-21 14:15 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (isovalent.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (isovalent.com)
| klooney wrote:
| Oh no, that's a bad sign for the future of Cilium.
| ABS wrote:
| Not too concerned, Cilium was accepted by the CNCF in 2021 and
| moved from "Incubating" to "Graduated" a couple of months ago.
| acdha wrote:
| How many of the core developers don't work for Cisco?
| Projects tend to go where the core team wants.
| ABS wrote:
| I would guess the majority of the core team works for
| Isovalent but Cilium is a mature product by now, used by
| tens of huge companies (e.g. Google's GKE, AWS, Alibaba).
|
| Cisco can screw (and likely will) the commercial Enterprise
| offering, not really the Cilium project
| acdha wrote:
| Two things to think about: say they make a big product
| direction change you don't want - how many people are
| going to contribute to a community fork? Or say random,
| senseless acts of MBA happen and nobody is employed to
| work on it any more.
|
| Those big companies are inconsistent so you can't count
| on that, especially if the change doesn't affect them or
| they're already maintaining an internal fork. It's not
| mission critical for them so I would not be shocked if
| they decided that some other approach was best for their
| businesses and their engineers spend time migrating
| instead of taking over maintainership.
|
| I'm not saying that will or even is likely to happen but
| I would think about how hard it would be for you if it
| did because the odds of Cisco screwing up a popular
| project are a lot greater than zero.
| houseofzeus wrote:
| They would have had to add a few externals to get to
| Graduated but it's definitely a minority:
|
| https://github.com/cilium/cilium/blob/main/MAINTAINERS.md
| beardedwizard wrote:
| in contract negotiations right now. this will 100% be a
| negative factor like when sophos bought capusl8.
| throwaway2847 wrote:
| Always sad to see a small player swallowed up by Cisco.
|
| As someone who had the unfortunate experience of going through a
| Cisco acquisition, there's a familiar pattern.
|
| You can expect that their product roadmap will be torn to shreds
| as Cisco VPs start streaming in to demand poorly designed
| integration projects with Cisco's terrible platforms to pad their
| own resumes. Talent drain ensues as Cisco's low bar for hiring
| starts to take effect.
|
| The product will keep selling, since Cisco's MO is to leverage
| its massive sales machine to boost revenue, but there will be
| little concern for the actual tech itself going forward.
| windexh8er wrote:
| Yes, I was really disappointed to see this. I've pointed a lot
| of PM and folks to Isovalent and Cillium. I really like the
| idea of eBPF as it solves a lot of the issues that just are
| poorly handled by middleware/middlebox solutions. I'm not sure
| why a company like Palo Alto Networks didn't jump on this
| earlier. I know that this, somewhat, cannibalizes their core
| business model (middlebox solutions) - however I feel like it
| would have been more of an additional layer than a complete
| product line disruption.
|
| At the end of the day this is a great buy for Cisco, but
| horrible news for customers. I feel as though Isovalent was a
| bit too early with their mouse trap, but damn is it a good one.
| jen20 wrote:
| At least it's not IBM, I suppose!
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Teams and founders who have built material value deserve
| liquidity and an exit. It sucks when they exit to these sorts
| of orgs, propose a better path that maintains the value but
| still provides the exit. Customers becoming shareholders
| through a direct offering comes to mind, but there are other
| avenues.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| At some point I feel like customers are going to be extremely
| wary of buying anything from smaller players if they know
| their filet mignon is destined to instantly transform into a
| turd sandwich the moment the inevitable acquisition occurs.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Unlikely, the candy is too sweat and the incentives are too
| short term for anyone to care (on all sides). "Prepare
| three envelopes."
|
| https://kevinkruse.com/the-ceo-and-the-three-envelopes/
| bastard_op wrote:
| That is rather sad, Cisco will ruin another good product
| bringing it into their mediocre product lines to be
| marginalized to nothing over time. I've had friends that have
| come into Cisco through acquisition, they invariably last long
| enough to vest enough of their stock options and get the hell
| out as quick as possible, almost always 2 years on the dot. I
| bet Cisco HR can track that as a reliable metric.
|
| Now the purchase of anyone by Cisco simply signals a death
| knell for them. Last words generally heard now are "they used
| to be cool".
| tptacek wrote:
| Cisco has been different companies over the last 30 years, and
| it's not hard for me to believe their current incarnation is
| drastically more hospitable than their mid-aughts incarnation.
| jdorfman wrote:
| I love to see stories like this. Inspiring other companies that
| contributing to open source can have a ROI.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Do you like to see these stories as a customer/user or as a
| founder/investor?
| jdorfman wrote:
| As an open source contributor and community member.
| gtirloni wrote:
| Maybe you're not aware of what happens when big companies
| buy smaller companies that were the main stewards of open
| source projects. There are many comments in here detailing
| how much can and usually goes wrong (for contributors,
| users and the community at large).
| jdorfman wrote:
| Oh, I'm aware. Cisco will most likely fuck this up
| somehow. But this story will inspire other small
| companies to invest in contributing to the open source
| supply chain which is good for all of us.
| hintklb wrote:
| Did they though? No price announced which means it's not even
| clear if investors and employees were made whole.
| jdorfman wrote:
| True. Maybe ROI wasn't the right phrase.
| billpg wrote:
| "What shall we call our company?"
|
| "Let's go with a word that looks a bit like 'Insolvent' when you
| glace at it in a hurry."
| vuln wrote:
| Right? That's immediately what I thought. Weird.
| jimmyed wrote:
| Oh no, this is sad news. I wish Isovalent had not given in to
| avarice, for I cannot ascribe this to anything else. They had
| really good engineers, with the best inhouse eBPF expertise of
| any company. This news is worse than CoreOS being gobbled up by
| RedHat.
| ABS wrote:
| acquisition (or an IPO but unlikely for such a niche product
| company) was planned for since day one and likely part of the
| reason they managed to attract many of those really good
| engineers.
|
| Series A $29M in 2021 by AZ and Google + Series B $40M in 2022
| by, among others, Cisco itself.
| jldugger wrote:
| Also, one of the cofounders worked at Cisco previously. I
| guess this is what it takes to get promoted at Cisco?
| rajaman0 wrote:
| don't love this framing - capitalism operates on avarice. Every
| for-profit company "gives in" to it to a great extent, so we
| shouldn't put undue blame on isovalent for just looking out for
| themselves and their employees.
| trevithick wrote:
| Do Cisco certifications still carry any weight? If not, is there
| another, non-Cisco cert that's worthwhile? I know CCNA etc. used
| to have value, but it seems most certifications in general are
| pretty worthless anymore.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| What are you trying to get into/validate?
| b5n wrote:
| IME certs are good for two things, novices who lack
| fundamentals and vendor partnerships (discounts and/or feature
| access that requires N certified devs/admins/etc.).
|
| There's also the case where documentation is poor/nonexistent,
| but the vendor charges customers for 'training' and all of a
| sudden useful resources become available. I've always felt it's
| a weird way to treat _already_ paying customers, but seems
| common in the networking world.
| acdha wrote:
| One other one: you work in an environment where that is
| required for some reason. I've known people who got certs
| because their company contracted for a client who paid more
| or required some fraction of the staff to be certified. If
| you work in that kind of area, not leaving money on the table
| is certainly understandable.
| wangman wrote:
| I guess the new CNCF Cilium Certified Associate (CCA) is a
| Cisco certification soon :)
| whalesalad wrote:
| Oh wow these are the folks who brought ebpf to the world.
|
| Very cool documentary about this:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb_vD3XZYOA
| tptacek wrote:
| They did a lot to popularize it, especially among K8s people
| and Go people, but they did not bring it into the world.
| hacknat wrote:
| Daniel Borkmann is at Isovalent, he is definitely co-creator
| of eBPF.
| tptacek wrote:
| Good point. He was at Red Hat when he did the work, though,
| right?
| hacknat wrote:
| Yes.
| whalesalad wrote:
| Didn't mean bring _into_ the world. Meant bring to the world
| as-in spread the word far and wide.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Yes, I get it, founders, employees and VCs need a "payday".
| Still, I feel like I want to start leaving one of my favorite
| all-time comments about how people are baffled how the poor tech
| folk will get by if they can't sell out:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38682717
| chmod600 wrote:
| Much like different companies need a different set of people,
| the same company at different stages needs a different set of
| people.
|
| Some people are great at the research / experimentation phase
| but not great when it comes to scaling up. Other people aren't
| great at scaling up but are great during the operational phase.
|
| The operational phase is the only place profit is generated,
| but the other people need to get paid, too.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| But the point is almost nobody believes a Cisco acquisition
| will lead to "better execution in the scaling phase".
|
| Instead, it will lead to the inevitable enshittification as
| customers are milked for more and more profit while the tech
| decays because all the good people leave.
| chmod600 wrote:
| That may be true for Cisco specifically; I don't know. But
| some acquisitions really go well and make sense for
| everyone.
|
| I don't think YouTube was profitable before acquisition.
| Now it's profitable and a great product.
| jay-barronville wrote:
| HN can really be quite interesting. Y'all want developers to
| develop open-source projects. Developers then struggle to
| financially sustain their projects. BigCo acquires a valuable
| project, providing liquidity and support to the developers.
| Instead of being happy for them, HN cries.
|
| Too many idealists here.
|
| What are the practical alternatives?
| keep_reading wrote:
| Everyone wants free software developers to slave away for free.
| Give away your worldly things, don't worry about feeding your
| family or keeping shelter over your head -- just keep on
| cranking out new releases out of the goodness of your own
| hearts.
| kiddico wrote:
| There are no practical alternatives.
|
| It's just simultaneously true that people are sad about the
| inevitable loss of a previously open source project, and that
| people are happy the devs are now getting paid for their
| efforts.
|
| Imo HN tends to show both once the comments settle.
| genbit wrote:
| Even though Cisco acquires them, I believe this is not going to
| be a "RIP" story -- Cilium is a graduated CNCF project, adopted
| by all major cloud providers, used by many fortune 100 companies,
| and have a rich/diverse contributors community. Plus the team at
| Isovalent is super strong, and eBPF powerhouse, they are going to
| continue working on Cilium, Tetragon, and other eBPF projects.
| And they've build a strong and vibrant OSS community. Cisco did a
| really smart and strategic move to lead a modernization of
| networking and security.
| jbiggley wrote:
| I agree. The team at Isovalent is extraordinary and should
| continue to be strong champions of BPF for network and security
| use cases. With Cisco footing the bill, I think we will see
| even more expansion into XDP traffic processing that is native
| to hardware vs. the current overlay model.
|
| First Splunk, now Isovalent. Cisco has been busy this year!
| randmeerkat wrote:
| > The team at Isovalent is extraordinary and should continue
| to be strong champions of BPF for network and security use
| cases.
|
| That won't stop a bunch of them from being laid off like what
| happened during the Splunk acquisition.
| kapilvt wrote:
| Those products are at very different maturity points, wrt
| to continued commercial adoption, aka revenue gen.
| adra wrote:
| Man, I read the headline three times and each time I read Cisco
| is acquiring insolvent. Bad idea naming a company so close to an
| English word both in length, number of similar characters, and
| most importantly first and last chars.
| hintklb wrote:
| No price announced which usually means it is not an amazing
| outcome.
|
| Employees might not even make anything depending on the strike
| price.
| denysvitali wrote:
| Mixed feelings - Isovalent is such a great company that it's sort
| of sad to see it acquired by Cisco.
|
| Hopefully they will keep on being awesome - but Cisco
| acquisitions aren't generally positive for innovative companies
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Did anyone else dyslexize that company name into "Insolvent" and
| then wonder "what kind of sick joke is it to name your company
| "Insolvent "?
|
| Anyway, good luck to the Isovalent team on their job search.
| Getting bought by Cisco is not for the faint of heart...
| asmor wrote:
| Oh no, that turns Cilium from a safe choice into... somewhat
| uncertain.
|
| Maybe I should look into Istio again.
| Yasuraka wrote:
| From what I've read and heard, Istio's complexity makes the
| bite barely worth the chew.
|
| Regarding Cilium, there's a backup plan as soon as there's a
| license change, which would be a herald of things to come:
|
| the fork.
| sargun wrote:
| This was likely always the path forward for Isovalent. Thomas
| Graf was at Cisco prior to building Isovalent (where I believe he
| was working on eBPF stuff too). Their series A had Cisco in it:
| https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/covalent-io-series-....
|
| Cisco has this idea of spin-ins, that they executed on for
| sometime, although I believe it's no longer fashionable:
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/one-ciscos-star-engineers-def...
| rickysarora wrote:
| any guesses on what Cisco paid for them?
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