Hashicorp signs agreement to be acquired by IBM

vermyndax@lemmy.world to Technology@lemmy.world – 163 points –
43

RedHat and Hashicorp under IBM. Hmm, that doesn't bode well for the future.

I know people hear Hashicorp and instantly think Terraform, but Vault is the real crown jewel here.

RIP, wanted to implement that, but fuck it. Last time I needed to list versions of IBM MQ (contractor uses it, so I had to replicate it in local env) - and I fucking couldn't. How can someone make such a dumb fucking website is beyond me.

So let me get this straight: Hashicorp gets private equity'd, changes its license to be a rentseeker against Amazon and Google, and now sells itself to the OG rentseeker.

What the fuck happened to open source?

I would argue "open source". I've paid attention to hashicorp for a while. They were always about "getting that bag". Open source was a means to their ends.

Something was fucky with them since day 1 and the fact many companies were openly using alpha software on production environments (my work included). Always rubbed me the wrong way.

For good open source look at apps like Zabbix.

Turns out that IBM is leading OpenTofu efforts. Nevermind, it's OpenBao they are working on (Hashicorp Vault FOSS fork), we might just be done here.

Also Pulumi is technically fucked too. Back to good old shell scripting boys

Turns out that IBM is leading OpenTofu efforts.

IBM is in no way involved in OpenTofu. Afaik they are involved in OpenBao.

Source: I'm the technical lead of the OpenTofu project.

The bastards can never take away your shell script full of arcane and unreadable curl commands parsed by incomprehensible awk scripts!

Isn't Pulumi moving to native API stuff instead of the tf provider?

They wish. Nobody is gonna replicate that effort successfully any time soon.

You’d sooner get the cloud providers to standardize on an api.

I mean, they have AWS Native (in preview) and Azure Native. So it's a little more substantial than a wish.

Crossplane has also had internal providers in development for 3 years. Bottom line is unless the actual cloud provider is devoting developer resources to a provider(like they do for the TF providers), it's unlikely to happen.

I guess I need to start looking deeper into this, and the potential for importing existing infrastructures into pulumi's purview. But I'm hesitant - I don't want pulumi to pull a Hashicorp. I'm wondering if it's best to just go with CFN and Bicep.

If you're migrating from tf, OpenTofu might be a better option. I mostly like Pulimi for the language options.

hashicorp's APIs will be right at home at IBM. Right along with HCL. not a fan of either but have been forced to use them. this might bode well for my future if a pending license change is coming.

Damn, iirc someone (forgot who) actually called it at the beginning of terraform debacle, though it was redhat instead of ibm, but close enough.

Well, Redhat is owned by IBM now so basically spot on

IBM: Hi guys. Can I be relevant again? Guys? Guys hello.... Hello?

HashiCorp provides a suite of tools intended to support the development and deployment of large-scale service-oriented software installations. Each tool is aimed at specific stages in the life cycle of a software application, with a focus on automation. Many have a plugin-oriented architecture in order to provide integration with third-party technologies and services.[16] Additional proprietary features for some of these tools are offered commercially and are aimed at enterprise customers.[17]

Can someone tell me what this actually means?

Imagine what happen when you bought a new computer. You'll install an os, then install all apps you need, copy over all data you need, etc. Now imagine if you have 100 of new computers. The tools hashicorp made basically enable you to create a recipe to perform all this operation over a fleet of servers.

They provide tools that make it easier to automate large-scale deployments of servers and applications.

Instead of dealing with proprietary rest APIs to manage every third party service you use, you can use a declarative, idempotent format to define infrastructure that's compatible with all of them

They do tools for programmers. Big projects! But not stuff sold at retail. The plugin stuff is saying it plays well with the other kids on the playground.

And you get extras if you pay more.