[HN Gopher] IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal
___________________________________________________________________
IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal
Author : amateurhuman
Score : 208 points
Date : 2024-04-24 20:21 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.reuters.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.reuters.com)
| lma21 wrote:
| > IBM will pay $35 per share for HashiCorp, a 42.6% premium to
| Monday's closing price
|
| Is that an insane premium or what?
| jedberg wrote:
| Yeah, congrats to the people who held the stock yesterday!
| NewJazz wrote:
| I think typical premium is about 20% for acquisitions.
|
| 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).
| mdasen wrote:
| Yea, I think it often depends on where a company's stock has
| moved recently. IBM's offer is still below HashiCorp's
| 52-week high. That means there's probably a lot of current
| investors who likely wouldn't approve a deal at a 20%
| premium. If your stock is near its 52-week high, then a 20%
| premium looks a lot more reasonable.
|
| 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.
| rwmj wrote:
| It was a 63% premium when IBM bought Red Hat. Sadly I'd sold my
| RSUs about 2 days before :-(
| dralley wrote:
| Same, but with ESPP stock, and it was a few months earlier.
| Ouch.
| teeray wrote:
| Thereby really putting the Corp into HashiCorp.
| wmf wrote:
| Official: https://newsroom.ibm.com/2024-04-24-IBM-to-Acquire-
| HashiCorp...
|
| Confirming what everybody knows, IBM views HashiCorp's products
| as Terraform, Vault, and some other shit.
| amateurhuman wrote:
| From HashiCorp: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-joins-
| ibm
| achristmascarl wrote:
| terraform changed to business source license pretty recently too:
| https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-sou...
| dralley wrote:
| Considering IBM sided with the fork, I suspect it'll be
| reverted for most or all of Hashicorp's projects.
| colechristensen wrote:
| That is the kind of thing that could have been a kind of
| negotiation tactic for purchasing Hashicorp, not necessarily
| done in good faith.
| rezonant wrote:
| Hashicorp's relicensing could also have been a tactic to
| get the sale to happen.
| rezonant wrote:
| I bet they'll organize it under Red Hat, and Red Hat will
| apply their open source policy to it, and that will involve
| reverting to OSI approved licenses
| calgoo wrote:
| I mean, they bought Red Hat, and killed CentOS; I can say
| after 25 years in enterprise IT, I have zero trust in IBM
| to keep any open source licensing "open".
| dralley wrote:
| IBM didn't kill CentOS.
| calgoo wrote:
| They where under IBM ownership at the time, so IBM did
| kill it. The software now branded as CentOS is basically
| Fedora, which is fine for desktops, but never felt good
| on servers. CentOS was perfect for a lot of us SysAdmins
| back in the day to use on our own servers etc, while
| using Red Hat at work. We also used it for anything PoC
| or servers that did not require support. These days
| licensing is easier using models like AWS Subscriptions,
| but we used to buy licenses in bulk, and if there where
| not enough licenses, we had to do the whole procurement
| dance.
|
| Side note, in the 12 years that I used Red Hat at work,
| we used the support 2 times, and both times they
| forwarded some articles that we had already found and
| implemented. However, enterprise always demands some
| support contract behind critical systems to blame in case
| of disaster.
|
| Honestly, who knows what would have happened if Red Hat
| was left as an independent entity, but we do know for
| sure that they did make the changes after the
| acquisition.
| dralley wrote:
| I work at Red Hat. IBM was not involved in the decision
| to kill CentOS.
|
| >The software now branded as CentOS is basically Fedora
|
| This is nonsense. CentOS _Stream_ is _vastly_ more
| similar to CentOS than Fedora. It 's CentOS with rolling
| patches instead of bundling those same patches into minor
| releases every 6 months. Fedora is very, very different.
|
| The relationship between Fedora, CentOS Stream, RHEL and
| CentOS looks like this:
|
| Fedora Rawhide ---> Fedora
| ---------------------------------------> CentOS Stream
| ---> RHEL <-> CentOS
| blcknight wrote:
| That doesn't seem like what's happening from first
| appearances. Looks like it'll remain separate for now which
| means no RH influence to fix the licensing boondoggle.
| op00to wrote:
| Red Hat is a shell of itself. There is no appetite for
| taking on Terraform when Ansible is their ugly baby.
| tristan957 wrote:
| I've found they are complements to each other. One
| provisions infra, the other customized that infra for
| your needs.
|
| But I could be totally off-base.
| brian_herman wrote:
| When they did this the community forked it into
| https://opentofu.org/
| playingalong wrote:
| In what sense did they side with OpenTofu? Genuinely curious.
| lolinder wrote:
| I think you meant to reply to this one:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149230
| achristmascarl wrote:
| terraform changed to business source license pretty recently too:
| https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-sou...
| worik wrote:
| > terraform changed to business source license pretty recently
|
| Now we know why!
| jrockway wrote:
| I worked at a startup that got acquired by a big company and
| we switched our custom proprietary license back to Apache 2
| after acquisition. The reason we switched in the first place
| was because it's what we thought was best when we were out on
| our own. Being owned by a hardware company, you can have the
| software for free. (We still sell licenses and have a cute
| little license key validator, though.)
| ceocoder wrote:
| Once again, thank you 'mitchellh for Vagrant, I'm sure you have
| heard this many times before but it really changed the way we
| worked for the better in every way.
| kickofline wrote:
| Will we see Red Hat / IBM Terraform?
| op00to wrote:
| Never. Red Hat is focused on Ansible.
| vdfs wrote:
| My fear of missing out by not using any HashiCorp product is
| officially over
| mkovach wrote:
| So, will they now add JCL extensions to HCL? Will they be pulling
| TCL into the fold be the next plan?
| phlakaton wrote:
| They'll do what they should have done years ago: give up on all
| this fuddy duddy syntax and just go with XML. ;-)
| justinsaccount wrote:
| Not unexpected, I saw a comment a ways back when they started
| with the BSL stuff that it had nothing to do with terraform, but
| was a response to IBM selling Vault.
| brian_herman wrote:
| Community fork https://opentofu.org/
| ohad1282 wrote:
| Indeed. Owned by The Linux Foundation, so this will remain OSS
| forever/no rug pulls are possible.
| jakozaur wrote:
| Should we migrate to OpenTofu?
| wmf wrote:
| Since IBM loves the Linux Foundation it's not impossible that
| Terraform and OpenTofu will merge like GCC and EGCS back in the
| day.
| geekodour wrote:
| I've spent last 3 days learning nomad for my homelab setup, hope
| things stay more or less the same for it :)
| wmf wrote:
| Nomad will indeed stay the same if all future development
| ceases.
| chucky_z wrote:
| Nomad has a remarkably strong community for it's size. I'm
| almost positive it will continue to live in some format, even
| if completely hard-forked.
|
| 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. :)
| heipei wrote:
| Here's hoping they don't run great tools like Consul and Nomad
| into the ground somehow. If I'm ever forced to ditch Nomad and
| work with a pile of strung-together components like k8s I might
| just quit tech altogether.
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| Terrible news. New startups should be buying IBM. Not the other
| way around.
| soraminazuki wrote:
| Like how Google bought Doubleclick and definitely not the other
| way around?
| miningape wrote:
| Oh if only - it seems like somehow the shittiest culture
| manages to out survive the other and entrench itself inside
| the business. I know HN likes to blame this on the stock
| market forcing short term revenues but I think it goes deeper
| - the good "culture" employees actively flee these
| environments.
|
| Boeing acquiring McDonald Douglas is a classic example of
| this exact scenario: "McDonald Douglas bought Boeing with
| Boeings money."
| vundercind wrote:
| Heh, interesting example because DoubleClick _kinda_ did take
| over Google.
| dralley wrote:
| IBM has ~280,000 employees. There's no sensible way for a
| company like IBM to be acquired by a startup.
| racl101 wrote:
| A startup like Microsoft? lol. IBM is pretty fucking huge
| still.
| rank0 wrote:
| Lmao. Which startup has ~$200B to buy out IBM? Folks are loopy
| in startup land!
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| Huh? HashiCorp is a large, post IPO company. They aren't a 'new
| startup'. You just think that they're flashy.
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Some more discussion yesterday ahead of the deal:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _IBM nearing a buyout deal for HashiCorp, source says_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 - April 2024 (170
| comments)
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I wonder how this will work with Red Hat. Traditionally, Red Hat
| and HashiCorp competed more directly than other IBM portfolio
| products, fighting over the same customer dollars.
| throwup238 wrote:
| Number one rule of megacorp M&A: Juice quarterly numbers first,
| ask capital allocation efficiency questions never.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| The copy could not be more IBM:
| https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-joins-ibm
|
| Accelerate! Multi-cloud! Automation!
| roschdal wrote:
| Overpriced, haha.
| beastman82 wrote:
| Agree, this number seems enormous. Maybe there is a big stream
| of hosted services revenue that I'm just not participating.
| shawabawa3 wrote:
| Hashicorp is public. It's like a 15% premium on what their
| stock was trading at so it can't be too overpriced (or at
| least, more than it was already)
| paulddraper wrote:
| It's "only" 15% above market. (Which is not unusual for an
| aquisition.)
| dilyevsky wrote:
| It's ~10x their revenue which is not crazy in saas. If
| anything it's underpriced only because of current economic
| headwinds
| praveenweb wrote:
| 12x multiple for a Cloud SaaS company is not overpriced
| typically. I was surprised at this low multiple. Could be due
| to the current economic situation. And also the licensing
| changes, lack of product moat contributing in the wrong time.
| alando46 wrote:
| Gg hashicorp
| solardev wrote:
| I didn't know IBM still had money to throw around like that. What
| do they even do these days? Who are their customers?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| IBM had ~$14B cash to start the year.
|
| Additionally, you don't need the full purchase price in cash to
| buy the company. You can do leveraged buyouts, etc.
| czbond wrote:
| IBM M&A person: "We'd like to buy you in all IBM stock! <jazz
| hands>"
|
| Hopefully someone at HashiCorp: "Hell no, cash please"
| Disp4tch wrote:
| IBM stock is basically cash. Limited growth potential, very
| stable, fat dividend.
| mywittyname wrote:
| Press release says it's all cash at $35/sh using cash-on-
| hand for the purchase.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| Ugh, and have you actually looked at IBM'e share price? Or
| is it this because IBM isn't cool to you? A bit rich for a
| community that'll go work for shares in some dinky web app
| startup.
| playingalong wrote:
| Just guessing - large corporate bespoke software / integrations
| projects?
| belter wrote:
| This type of comment appears here every time the name IBM shows
| up, but it is more symptomatic, of the bubble a part of HN
| lives on.
|
| 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://www.ibm.com/products
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IBM_products
| bluGill wrote:
| It is more than IBM used to be a big name in areas where
| hackers would be expected to be. They have left all those
| behind though. there are lots of other companies that none of
| us would recognize that are big, but IBM is a name that we
| all know as once somewhat important who now are not.
| cqqxo4zV46cp wrote:
| Uhm, the term "hacker" in this context, is, itself, just a
| coded way of saying "cool developer in the same circles as
| me".
|
| Again, HN users are in a bubble, and HN users think that
| they're very trendy.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| Yep. My dad sold IBM server software for most of his career.
| His customers were banks, railways, and governments.
| busymom0 wrote:
| I worked for IBM in early 2010s and Universities were also
| one of their customers for business analytics.
| TillE wrote:
| Indeed, there's also a whole world of B2B software which you
| may be almost entirely unaware of if you've spent your whole
| career in consumer-facing web/app development.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| a lot of banks still use the main frame. IBM got out of
| pc/server game but not the main frame. IBM is a big player in
| that game.
| nullindividual wrote:
| Airlines, as well. COBOL is still running business and
| flight critical services.
| silisili wrote:
| This may be a slightly more clear wiki link, especially
| looking at post 2000 -
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio.
| ..
| timr wrote:
| They did $14.5 billion dollars in revenue in Q1, with a 54%
| gross margin, split across software, consulting and
| infrastructure:
|
| https://finance.yahoo.com/news/ibm-releases-first-quarter-re...
| lolinder wrote:
| They bought Red Hat in 2019 for $34B, which means their
| customers are at a minimum every RHEL customer.
|
| https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/ibm-closes-la...
| arp242 wrote:
| IBM did ~$62 billion in revenue last year, with a ~$7.5 billion
| net income. They employ ~280,000 people.
|
| I think they can find a few billions lying around, without
| having to turn the sofa cushions.
| listenallyall wrote:
| Other than a period around 2012-13, IBM's market cap is higher
| than it's ever been.
| op00to wrote:
| IBM is essentially a large bank with a side business of tech.
| IBM is known for financially complex deals that are highly
| lucrative. They make their money by taking advantage of
| inefficiencies in the largest enterprises purchasing and
| technology teams.
| ClassAndBurn wrote:
| Hashi never sold me on the integration of their products, which
| was my primary issue with not selecting them. Each is
| independently useful, and there is no nudge to combine them for a
| 1+1=3 feature set.
|
| 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.
| JohnMakin wrote:
| I was an extremely early user and owner of a very large-scale
| Vault deployment on Kubernetes. Worked with a few of their
| sales engineers closely on it - was always told early on that
| although they supported vault on kubernetes via a helm chart,
| they did not recommend using it on anything but EC2 instances
| (because of "security" which never really made sense their
| reasoning). During every meeting and conference I'd ask about
| Kubernetes support, gave many suggestions, feedback, showed the
| problems we encountered - don't know if the rep was blowing
| smoke up my ass but a few times he told me that we were doing
| things they hadn't thought of yet.
|
| 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.
| downrightmike wrote:
| We really need a 2.0 version that actually delivers the promise
| these tools never reached because legacy decisions
| candiddevmike wrote:
| FWIW, "HashiStack" was a much discussed, much promised, but
| never delivered thing. I think the way HashiCorp siloed their
| products into mini-fiefdoms (see interactions between the Vault
| and Terraform teams over the Terraform Vault provider)
| prevented a lot of cross-product integration, which is ironic
| for how "anti-silo" their go to market is.
|
| There's probably an alternate reality where something like
| HashiStack became this generation's vSphere, and HashiCorp
| stayed independent and profitable.
| the_real_cher wrote:
| Is OpenTofu better?
| devjab wrote:
| Hashicorp does so much more than terraform, but I don't think
| OpenTofu is better than terraform. I'm not sure that was ever
| really an interesting issue, however, I think the main
| competition to terraform was/is things like Bicep.
|
| 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.
| rzr999 wrote:
| What happens to shares? Are people getting IBM stock or cash?
| arcticgeek wrote:
| I guess this shows us how overvalued HCP IPO was.
| calgoo wrote:
| Well, it was nice while it lasted! HashiCorp always felt like a
| company made by actual engineers, not "bean counters". Now it
| will just be another cog in the IBM machine, slowly grinding it
| down, removing everything attractive, just like RedHat and
| CentOS.
|
| Hopefully this will create a new wave off innovation, and someone
| will create something to replace the monopoly on IaC that IBM now
| owns.
| tithe wrote:
| The timing of this acquisition, and the FTC's ban on non-
| compete agreements is perfect.
| binarymax wrote:
| Usually during an acquisition like this, the key staff are
| paid out after two years on board the new company. So not a
| non-compete, but an incentive to stay and get their payout.
|
| Most staff with no equity will leave quickly of course, so
| the invalidity of non compete will definitely help those
| souls.
| cratermoon wrote:
| "golden handcuffs" they call them.
| andrewstuart2 wrote:
| Honestly, Mitchell should still be very proud of what he built
| and the legacy of Hashicorp. Sure, the corp has taken a
| different direction lately but thanks to the licenses of the
| Hashicorp family of software, it's almost entirely available
| for forking and re-homing by the community that helped build it
| up to this point. E.g. opentofu and openbao. I'm sure other
| projects may follow and the legacy will endure, minus (or maybe
| not, you never know) contributions from the company they built
| to try to monetize and support that vision.
| rank0 wrote:
| I don't understand people's beef with IBM. They have been
| responsible for incredible R&D within computing. I even LIKE
| redhat/fedora!
|
| HashiCorp had already been sold out since waaaay before this
| acquisition and I also don't understand why their engineers are
| seen as "special"...
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| People's beef here with IBM is they don't make shiny phones
| and laptops and don't create hip jobs where you're paid 500k+
| to "change the world" by selling ads or making the 69th
| messaging app.
|
| 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.
| redserk wrote:
| This is unnecessarily dismissive.
|
| While Hashicorp hasn't been exciting for a while, I fail to
| see how an acquisition from IBM will invigorate excitement,
| much less even a neutral reaction from many developers.
|
| Hashicorp had a huge hand in defining and popularizing the
| modern DevOps procedures we now declare as best practices.
| That's a torch to hold that would be very difficult for a
| business like IBM.
|
| Perhaps I missed some things but the core of Ansible feels
| like it's continuing it's path to be _much_ less of a
| priority over the paid value-adds. I can't help but to
| think the core of Hashicorp's products will go down this
| path, hence my pessimism.
| alemanek wrote:
| You have obviously never been the victim of IBMs consulting
| arm. I caution anyone against buying anything IBM now.
| Absolute nightmare to work with.
| tempest_ wrote:
| or just work anywhere within IBM
| op00to wrote:
| My beef with IBM as someone who worked for a company they
| acquired is that they would interfere with active deals
| that I was working on, force us to stand down while IBM
| tried to sell some other bullshit, then finally "allow us"
| to follow up with the customer once it's too late, and the
| customer decided to move on to something else. Repeatedly.
|
| Fuck IBM.
| nomat wrote:
| There are a number of valid criticisms about IBM
| paulddraper wrote:
| Watson
| altairprime wrote:
| IBM took away the ability of CentOS to be a free and trivial
| to swap-in alternative to the paid product RedHat Enterprise.
| That RedHat was already in financial trouble due to self-
| cannibalizing their own paid product is irrelevant;
| emotionally, "IBM" - not "RedHat" - made the decision to stop
| charging $0 for their custom enterprise patchsets and release
| trains, and so IBM will always be the focus of community ire
| about RedHat's acquisition.
|
| 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.
| TheCondor wrote:
| IBM has _always_ been a punching bag.
|
| 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.)
| jmspring wrote:
| IBM was taken over by bean counters years ago. There were
| researchers and others that would literally skip being in or
| find a way to avoid bean counters when they walked through
| IBM Research Labs (like Almaden Research Center) years ago
| (heard from multiple people years back that were working on
| contracts/etc there - mainly academics).
|
| Also, IBM has been extremely ageist in their "layoff"
| policies. They also have declined in quality by outsourcing
| to low cost/low skill areas.
| neurostimulant wrote:
| It was special when Mitchell Hashimoto was still at the helm.
| jbm wrote:
| A lot of the people I respected from Heroku went there, glad
| they got a chance to use their skills to build something useful
| and profitable; glader still that they got their payout.
|
| 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.
| nomat wrote:
| our current economic model kind of depends on the idea that
| we can always disrupt the status quo with american free
| market ingenuity once it begins to stagnate but maybe we have
| reached the limits of what friedman's system can do or
| accounted for.
| glenngillen wrote:
| Heh at "got their payout". HashiCorp IPO'd at $80, employees
| are locked up for 6 months. This sale is at $35.
| jnsaff2 wrote:
| > HashiCorp always felt like a company made by actual
| engineers.
|
| 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.
| afavour wrote:
| Inability to price things correctly sounds exactly like
| engineer behavior to me...
| renegade-otter wrote:
| Hashi code, such as Terraform, was (is) an amazing example of a
| good reference Go codebase. It was very hard for me to get into
| Go because, outside of the language trivia and hype, it was
| hard to learn about the patterns and best practices needed for
| building even a mid-sized application.
| hpeter wrote:
| That's interesting. I found Go to be a very productive and
| easy language, coming from Typescript.
|
| But I had a similar experience like yours with PHP, I just
| couldn't get into it.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| I find the claims that Go is easy just wrong. It's actually
| a harder language to write in because without discipline,
| you are going to end up maintaining massive amounts of
| boilerplate.
|
| That's from someone who did a bunch - Perl, Ruby, Python,
| Java, C++, Scala.
|
| Syntax is one thing, assembling an application with
| maintainable code is something else.
| NomDePlum wrote:
| What in particular did you find difficult building a
| maintainable codebase in Golang? Not quite understanding
| the boilerplate reference.
|
| Code generation in Golang is something I've found removed
| a lot of boilerplate.
| renegade-otter wrote:
| I am not used to writing code where 2/3 of it is "if err"
| statements.
|
| Also, refactoring my logging statements so I could see
| the chain of events seemed like work I rarely had to do
| in other languages.
|
| It's a language the designers of which - with ALL due
| respect - clearly have not built a modern large
| application in decades.
| aaomidi wrote:
| Yes because other language just hide errors from the
| user.
|
| I think the reason people find go a bit annoying with the
| error condition is because go actually treats errors as a
| primary thought, not an after thought like Python, Java.
| janosdebugs wrote:
| Not the parent, but I find that doing dependency
| injection or defensive programming results in a lot of
| boilerplate. Custom error types are extemely wordy. The
| language also doesn't allow for storing metadata with
| types, only on structs as tags, which seriously hampers
| the ability to generate code. For example, you can't
| really express the concept of a slice in a slice
| containing an integer needing validation metadata well.
| You'll need to describe your data structure externally
| (OpenAPI, JSON schema, etc) and then generate code from
| that.
| NomDePlum wrote:
| My experience of Golang is that dependency injection
| doesn't really have much benefit. It felt like a square
| peg in a round hole exercise when my team considered it.
| The team was almost exclusively Java/Typescript Devs so
| it was something that we thought we needed but I don't
| believe we actually missed once we decided to not pursue
| it.
|
| If you are looking at OpenAPI in Golang I can recommend
| having a look at https://goa.design/. It's a DSL that
| generates OpenAPI specs and provides an implementation of
| the endpoints described. Can also generate gRPC from the
| same definitions.
|
| We found this removed the need to write almost all of the
| API layer and a lot of the associated validation. We
| found the generated code including the server element to
| be production ready from the get go.
| janosdebugs wrote:
| After having written probably over 100k lines of Go code,
| my impression is that Go is simple, but not easy. The
| language has very few features to learn, but that results
| in a lot of boilerplate code and there are more than a few
| footguns burried in the language itself. (My favorite [1])
|
| I find it very hard to write expressive, easy to read code
| and more often than not I see people using massive switch-
| case statements and other, hard to maintain patterns
| instead of abstracting away things because it's so painful
| to create abstractions. (The Terraform/OpenTofu codebase is
| absolutely guilty of this btw, there is a reason why it's
| over 300k lines of code. There is a lot of procedural code
| in there with plenty of hidden global scope, so getting
| anything implemented that touches multiple parts typically
| requires a lot of contortions.)
|
| It's not a bad language by any stretch, but there are
| things it is good at and things it is not really suited
| for.
|
| [1]: https://gist.github.com/janosdebugs/f0a3b91a0a070ffb06
| 7de4dc...
| djbusby wrote:
| Is it because secondSlice is a reference (pointer?) to
| firstSlice?
| janosdebugs wrote:
| Yes-ish? Slices are this weird construct where they
| sometimes behave like references and sometimes not. When
| I read the explanation, it always makes sense, but when
| using them it doesn't. For me the rule is: don't reuse
| slices and don't modify them unless you are the "owner"
| of the slice. Appending to a slice that was returned to
| you from a function is usually a pretty good way to have
| a fun afternoon debugging.
| cedws wrote:
| I see this as an opportunity. Not to replace HashiCorp's
| products - OpenTofu and OpenBao are snapping up most of the
| mindshare for now - but to build another OSS-first developer
| darling company.
| joshmanders wrote:
| Onboardbase is a great alternative to HashiCorp Vault.
|
| https://onboardbase.com/
| cube2222 wrote:
| Btw. OpenTofu 1.7.0 is coming out next week, which is the
| first release that contains meaningful Tofu-exclusive
| features! We just released the release candidate today.
|
| 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].
|
| [0]: https://opentofu.org/docs/next/intro/whats-new/
|
| [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6OXBv0MYalY
| mootpt wrote:
| i can only speak to the early days (joined around 11 folks),
| but the engineers then were top tier and hungry to build cool
| shit. A few years later (as an outsider) seemed innovation had
| slowed substantially. i still know there are great folks there,
| but has felt like HashiCorp's focus lately has been packaging
| up all their tools into a cohesive all-in-one solution (this
| was actually Atlas in the early days) and figuring out their
| story around service lifecycle with experiments like Waypoint
| (Otto in the early days). IBM acquisition is likely best
| outcome.
| sureglymop wrote:
| Regarding Red Hat, I dearly hope someone will replace the slow
| complicated mess that is ansible. It's crazy that this seems to
| be the best there is...
| alecsm wrote:
| Why slow and complicated?
|
| We're just starting to implement it and we've only heard good
| things about it.
| dontdoxxme wrote:
| Ansible is great if you have workflows where sysadmins SSH
| to servers manually. It can pretty much take that workflow
| and automate it.
|
| The problem is it doesn't go much beyond that, so you're
| limited by SSH roundtrip latency and it's a pain to
| parallelize (you end up either learning lots of options or
| mitogen can help). However fundamentally you're still
| SSHing to machines, when really at scale you want some kind
| of agent on the machine (although ansible is a reasonable
| way to bootstrap something else).
| deadbunny wrote:
| Saltstack is IMO superior to Ansible. It uses ZMQ for command
| and control. You can write everything in python if you want
| but the default is YAML + JINJA2. And is desired state not
| procedural.
|
| 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.
| cjk2 wrote:
| My personal opinion is it was a company for crack monkeys.
| Consul, Vault and Packer have been nothing but pain and misery
| for me over the last few years. The application of these
| technologies has been nothing but a loss of ROI and sanity on a
| promise.
|
| 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.
| skywhopper wrote:
| When a massive ecosystem springs up around a product, that
| means it's wildly successful, actually.
| skywhopper wrote:
| It _was_ this, but hasn't been for a couple of years at least.
| The culture really shifted once it was clear the pivot to
| becoming a SaaS-forward company wasn't taking off. As soon as
| the IPO happened and even a little bit before, it felt like the
| place was being groomed down from somewhere unique and
| innovative to a standardized widget that would be attractive to
| enterprise-scale buyers like VMware or IBM.
| nkotov wrote:
| Certainly an interesting turn of events. I really enjoy using
| Terraform (and Terraform cloud) for work but the license changes
| made me cautious to integrate anymore.
| mywittyname wrote:
| What was the licensing changes? I see a lot of references to it
| as though it was common knowledge, but I'm not aware of them.
|
| Edit: found something:
| https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-sou...
| rahkiin wrote:
| Nobody else is bow allowed to make a public offering of a
| terraform-using product. That is, you can not provide
| terraform as a service. Gitlab, Azure DevOps, etc all have to
| move to something else as they can not provide terraform
| builders without a special license.
|
| This was a major blow to the participating open source
| community. The license bow used is also vague and untested.
| williamDafoe wrote:
| Also you should know that while the terraform language is
| okay (albeit a little too dogmatic in a functional
| programming sense for my tastes), the terraform cloud
| product is pretty terrible, slow, and overpriced, snatching
| defeat from the jaws of victory based on the terraform
| language. This encouraged at least 4 companies to launch
| terraform-cloud-like products, and rather than compete and
| provide better service, Hashicorp responded by saying "take
| it or leave it, internet!" and they closed the open-source
| license on the interpreter (BUSL)...
| kevindamm wrote:
| Yeah, they went from a more permissive license (Mozilla MPL)
| to a less permissive one (BUSL) but I can kind of understand
| why. I can also understand why the OSS community is upset,
| and after Hashicorp went after OpenTOFU recently, I'm siding
| more with the OSS community here.
|
| 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.
| glenngillen wrote:
| It's been widely speculated, months ago when the change
| happened, that Terraform has become the scapegoat for this
| licensing change. The actual impetus was IBM reselling
| Vault. IBM then helped push the OSS fork of Vault (OpenBao)
| and this acquisition just brings this whole license change
| thing to a convenient conclusion for IBM.
| chrisbolt wrote:
| Previous:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149136
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149095
|
| Rumor: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303
| hbogert wrote:
| > By joining IBM, HashiCorp products can be made available to a
| much larger audience, enabling us to serve many more users and
| customers.
|
| I'm really wondering who is kidding who here. Is it IBM or Hashi?
| ilrwbwrkhv wrote:
| It's a shame that HashiCorp gave up. The govt bans foreign
| competition like Tiktok and in house competition don't have the
| stamina. Doesn't bode well for capitalism.
| dralley wrote:
| "Give up" is not really the appropriate terminology, the
| board of directors are the only ones that really have a say
| in acquisitions, and if the offer was given with a sufficient
| premium their own choice is limited by willingness to face
| shareholder lawsuits if they turn it down.
| empressplay wrote:
| IBM has its mitts into finance, defence, aerospace -- and these
| industries generally stick to IBM / IBM sanctioned products. So
| with IBM selling Vault / Boundary (in particular) they will get
| better adoption.
| op00to wrote:
| In my experience IBM uses the sexy stuff (used to be
| OpenShift) to get meetings then sells the same old boring IBM
| software and services after the initial meetings.
| EMCymatics wrote:
| How is Red Hat doing?
| dralley wrote:
| Contrary to the HN narrative, pretty OK. Not perfect, I have
| complaints, but most of them aren't related to IBM
| specifically.
|
| 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.
| op00to wrote:
| I left Red Hat a bit after the IBM acquisition, and in my
| experience the management bullshittery was encroaching about a
| year after the deal closed. I hear their sales team are all
| frustrated and leaving due to IBM's interference in Red Hat
| deals.
| rdl wrote:
| Now to find Vault alternatives.
| dangtony98 wrote:
| You should look into Infisical:
| https://github.com/Infisical/infisical
|
| Disclaimer: I'm one of the founders.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| Although I think they have very different use cases this means
| IBM own both Ansible and Terraform, both claiming to be IaC
| cdchn wrote:
| Soon to be built into Ansible Automation Platform. Should only
| cost $100 per managed resource.
| indigodaddy wrote:
| Is the implication that we won't be able to freely use
| ansible-playbook anymore, and/or development will end on the
| "freely" available one?
| angulardragon03 wrote:
| No, the implication is that Terraform will become
| prohibitively expensive to use. AAP has been around for a
| while, as Red Hat's downstream of (iirc) AWX. It's also
| quite pricey, like Terraform may become.
| aodin wrote:
| Although there is significant overlap between the two, I prefer
| Terraform for resource provisioning and Ansible for resource
| configuration.
| DerpHerpington wrote:
| Same, but now IBM will be able to merge them to create
| Terrible (or Ansiform). ;)
| rahkiin wrote:
| I like the joke. But a better integration between terraform
| and ansible for config would be pretty neat.
| MangoCoffee wrote:
| Based on what happened to RedHat/CentOS. i hope there'll be some
| forks like Rocky Linux on all HashiCorp's products.
| thinkmassive wrote:
| https://opentofu.org/
|
| https://openbao.org/
|
| Backed by the Linux Foundation
| foxandmouse wrote:
| I expected this when the terraform license changed. Not IBM
| specifically but it was obvious they weren't interested/ able to
| continue with their founding vision.
| paxys wrote:
| Hashicorp had a $14 billion IPO in Dec 2021 and was trading at
| ~$4.7 billion right before the acquisition announcement. At
| that point it doesn't matter what the company or its founders
| want or what their long term vision is. Shareholders are in
| charge and heads are going to roll if the price doesn't get
| back up quick by any means necessary.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| Yet another example of why I think it's a mistake to take
| your company public. If I put in the work to build up a
| successful business, no way would I ever let it be turned
| into a machine that ignores long term health for the sake of
| making the stock price go up.
| paxys wrote:
| While I would think that, realistically most of my
| principles are for sale for a few billion dollars.
| typeofhuman wrote:
| You have no idea what decisions you'll make if you ever
| were to get that successful.
|
| I'm sure you've broken many promises to your younger self.
| financetechbro wrote:
| If companies didn't go public regular people would not be
| able to invest in innovation. As much as people hate it,
| public markets democratize access to investments
| bloopernova wrote:
| If this accelerates migration away from Terraform towards a
| standard, open, IaC platform, then it's a good thing. Something
| like the JSON version of Terraform that can be generated by
| different tools, but an open standard instead.
|
| 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.
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| So basically you want OpenTofu. It's open source, you can make
| it do whatever you want, and there's a >0% chance your PRs will
| get accepted (compared to with HashiCorp)
| vundercind wrote:
| > Something like the JSON version of Terraform that can be
| generated by different tools, but an open standard instead.
|
| 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.
| dralley wrote:
| Agree on YAML, disagree on JSON.
| bloopernova wrote:
| You'd write in a language designed for humans, and that would
| get translated into a language for computers. In other words,
| JSON.
|
| What are your reasons for disliking JSON?
| vundercind wrote:
| Terrible, awful type system. And I just mean at the level
| of primitive types it can represent, nothing fancy. It
| doesn't even have a date type, let alone things like
| decimals.
|
| That'd be my argument specifically against using it to
| communicate between pieces of software--at least if you're
| hand-writing it there's the excuse that it's kinda, sorta
| easy to read and write (at least, people say that--IMO it's
| only true for tiny, trivial examples, but that may be a
| matter of taste)
|
| My take on it as a hand-written config/data language is
| that it's simply absurd. JSON-schema is terribly unwieldy,
| but also the _lingua franca_ , so if you want to keep your
| sanity you write something better to define your data
| structures (probably in some actual programming language)
| and generate JSON schema to share structure definitions
| among readers. Oh my--why?
| mathverse wrote:
| IBM will gut everything to the bone and send most of the jobs to
| India.
|
| There will be nothing worth of using pretty soon as we will all
| move to the next big foss thing.
| op00to wrote:
| There is plenty of money to milk from existing customers using
| Vault. For everyone else, yes - time to move on.
| dzonga wrote:
| funny how these things are sometimes.
|
| 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.
| dbalatero wrote:
| > technically, couldn't have IBM have hired Mitch when he was
| still doing vagrant ?
|
| That sort of vision/foresight seems fairly rare, I'd think
| particularly rare at an IBM type place.
| objektif wrote:
| It is extremely rare I would say. Also when you can buy a
| proven product why risk?
| primax wrote:
| Simply put, IBM doesn't have the kind of foresight and
| restraint to do something like that and not fuck it up
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| So long, and thanks for all the time we spend maintaining and
| fixing our Terraform code rather than just deploying an instance
| manually once. (It's been great for my job security!)
| spxneo wrote:
| so what are the alternatives now? preferably MIT licensed on
| github
| op00to wrote:
| I'm going back to CFengine!
| tiffanyh wrote:
| [Dup] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40149136
| devhead wrote:
| I wonder if this may mean we will see the Terraform dogmatic
| approach to declining to implement much requested functionality
| in the name of "it doesn't fit our ideals" go by the wayside. I
| hope so, otherwise, OpenTofu here I come; or well, I'm sure
| someone's got a ML infra tool in the works by now.
|
| 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.
| dang wrote:
| Recent and related:
|
| _IBM nearing a buyout deal for HashiCorp, source says_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40135303 - April 2024 (170
| comments)
| orf wrote:
| Back in 2015 I discovered a security issue with some Dell
| software[1]. I remember vividly getting an email about a job
| opportunity based entirely on this from a company with a strange
| name, that after some googling made a thing called Vagrant. They
| seemed super nice but I was _far_ too young and immature to
| properly evaluate the opportunity, so after a few emails I
| ghosted them out of fear of the unknown. In 2015 they had 50
| employees and had just raised a 10 million series A[2].
|
| 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...
|
| 2. https://www.hashicorp.com/about/origin-story
| bschmidt1 wrote:
| Question: Is the tldr of companies like these that they sell
| enterprise server software? And often own the hardware too (data
| centers)? And then sell a bunch of consulting services on top of
| that to Fortune 500s and governments? It's tempting to think "How
| are these guys even relevant anymore?" but IBM's making $60B+ a
| year with over $10B cash on hand, apparently from mostly
| "consulting services".
|
| 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.
| kevindamm wrote:
| Terraform does help with managing medium-large fleets, and a
| lot of special sauce is the structured types corresponding to
| cloud platforms (dubbed "providers") and the different services
| they offer. You could write your own configuration language and
| launcher but Terraform has been tested against many setups and
| can manage rolling restarts and other deployment methods. It's
| modular so you can define the configuration of a single server
| and then say "bring up 20 of these, use this docker image, name
| them thus," etc.
|
| 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.
| CSMastermind wrote:
| Well I will immediately be pivoting my company off of their
| products.
| atlantasun33 wrote:
| What happens to the employees of Hashicorp?
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