I joined HashiCorp in 2016 to work on Nomad and have been on the product ever since. Definitely a lot of feelings today. When I joined HashiCorp was maybe 50 people. Armon Dadgar personally onboarded us one at a time, and showed me how to use the coffee maker (remember to wash your own dishes!). There have been a lot of ups (IPO) and downs (BUSL), but the Nomad team and users have been the best I've ever gotten to work with.
I've only ever worked at startups before, but HashiCorp itself left that category when it IPO'd. Each phase is definitely different, but then again I don't want go back to roadmapping on a ridiculously small whiteboard in a terrible sub-leased office and building release binaries on my laptop. That was fun once, but I'm ready for a new phase in my own life. I've heard the horror stories of being acquired by IBM, but I've also heard from people who have reveled in the resources and opportunities. I'm hoping for the best for Nomad, our users, and our team. I'd like to think there's room in the world for multiple schedulers, and if not, it won't be for lack of trying.
I've had the incredible displeasure of having to maintain multiple massive legacy COTS systems that were once designed by promising startups and ultimately got bought by IBM. IBM turned every last one into the shittiest enterprise software trash you can imagine.
Every IBM product I've ever used is universally reviled by every person I've met who also had to use it, without exaggeration in the slightest. If anything, I'm understating it: I make a significant premium on my salary because I'm one of the few people willing to put up with it.
My only expectation here is that I'll finally start weaning myself off terraform, I guess.
Unfortunately IBM is going to ruin everything that was good about working for Hashicorp and eventually everything that was good about Hashicorp products.
I worked for a company acquired by IBM, and we held hope like you are doing, but it was only a matter of time before the benefit cuts, layoffs, and death of the pre-existing culture.
Your best bet is to quit right after the acquisition and hope they give you a big retention package to stay. These things are pretty common to ease acquisition transitions and the packages can be massive, easily six figures.
Then when the package pays out you can leave for good.
We use Nomad where I work and we LOVE it. Previous to Nomad we used K8s for several years which, at that point, allowed us to become cloud agnostic. With the move to Nomad about 3+ years ago, we were able to transition away from cloud and back to leased, bare metal machines. During our time with K8s, it didn't have a good bare-metal strategy with their ingress mechanism. In contrast, as we investigated Nomad, it was easy to deploy on pure metal without a hypervisor. The result of our migration to Nomad was having so many capable and far-less-expensive hosting options. Lastly, as part of our Nomad control plane, we also adopted Vault and Consul with great success.
I know there are horror stories around this acquisition and lots of predictions about what will happen, but only time will tell. On a minimum, it has been a delight to use the Hashicorp software stack along with the approach they brought to our engineering workflow (remember Vagrant?). These innovations and approaches aren't going away.
I would GTFO, IBM ain't your friend and ain't your savior and are unlikely to invest and the worse may come with increasing IBM management sticking their fingers in the pie. The folks who did well out of this already know, they have the checks to cash if that was your take away congratulations. Otherwise find another opportunity. If nothing else look around and find out what you are worth on the market and then have that hard discussion soon with HashiCorp/IBM.
I worked with a bunch of people who had worked at a startup that got bought by IBM. As the other commenters attested, they too experienced that IBM is not the kind of company that's going to turn on the investment taps.
There are worse companies to get bought by, but if you've only ever worked at startups then you're not likely to enjoy what this becomes.
Fairly large Nomad Enterprise user here, and I just want to say thanks for all of the work you and the team put in. I'm a big fan of Nomad and really appreciate the opportunities it has afforded me.
Regardless of the general sentiment, hoping for the best outcome for all of you.
Hey on a personal note, dealing with you and your team on Nomad's GitHub issue tracker was always a good experience. I hope nomad still has a future under IBM's roof.
I just wanted to say thank you for your work on Nomad. It's one of the most pleasant and useful pieces of software I have ever worked with. Nomad allowed us to build out a large fleet of servers with a small team while still enjoying the process.
No matter how long you worked at the acquiree and instrumental you were, be prepared for your opinions to be overridden by IBM lifers because you're not "true blue" (ie. directly to IBM). Also prepare for the bluewashing!
Just wanted to say thanks for your work on Nomad. Amazing tool that had me rethink a lot of things about how i work with infra and software in general and is always pleasant to work with by itself.
There are no resources and opportunities after being acquired by IBM. I worked for Red Hat when they were acquired. Our former CEO was quickly shown the door. We were making so much profit, almost a $1B in quarterly revenue. I left not long after the acquisition. Not long after I left, they laid off a bunch of staff.
No matter what they tell you, your day to day will not improve. For my area, it was mostly business as usual, but a net decrease in comp because IBM's ESPP is trash.
I was at a certain open source company IBM acquired, and it was certainly an interesting experience. I certainly don't harbor any overtly negative feelings towards IBM. I used to have negative feelings about IBM many years ago, as a customer in my former life as a sysadmin, many decades ago. However being under the IBM umbrellas was alright. Yall are going to be fine!
Hashicorp's stuff always struck me as pretty hacky with awkward design decisions. For Terraform (at least a few years ago) a badly reviewed PR could cause catastrophic data loss because resources are deleted without requiring an explicit tombstone.
Then they did the license change, which didn't reflect well on them.
Now it's being sold to IBM, which is essentially a consulting company trying to pivot to mostly undifferentiated software offerings. So I guess Hashicorp is basically over.
I suspect the various forks will be used for a while.
> For Terraform (at least a few years ago) a badly reviewed PR could cause catastrophic data loss because resources are deleted without requiring an explicit tombstone.
There have been lifecycle rules in place for as long as I can remember to prevent stuff like this. I'm not sure this is a "problem" unique to terraform.
I concur. I looked pretty hard into adapting Serf as part of a custom service mesh and it had some bonkers designs such as a big "everything" interface used just to break a cyclic module dependency (perhaps between the CLI and the library? I don't recall exactly), as well as lots of stuff that only made sense if you wanted "something to run Consul on top of" rather than a carefully-designed tool of its own with limited but cohesive scope. It seemed like a lot of brittle "just-so" code, which to some extent is probably due to how Go discourages abstraction, but really rubbed me the wrong way.
An easy way to get someone to admit that terraform is a hacky child’s language is to ask how to simply print out the values of variables and resources you are using in terraform easily. This basic programming language 101 functionality is not present in the language
My hot take is just that Vault isn't a good solution, and the permissions model is wholly inadequate.
Except for not "feeling" secure, the only thing everyone wants is a Windows AD file share with ACLs.
Just no one realises this: all the Vault on disk encryption and unsealing stuff is irrelevant - it's solving a problem handled at an entirely different level.
Sorry HashiCorp, been there and got the Tee-shirt (pink) :)
Actually for me, the company I was at that IBM purchased was on the verge of folding, so in that case, IBM saved our jobs and I was there for many years.
We experienced arbitrary layoffs in 2023, followed by an ominous feeling that more layoffs were imminent. However, the announcement of a deal changed the situation.
Now, we are actively hiring for numerous positions.
Personally, I am not planning to stay much longer. I had hoped that our corp structure would be similar to RedHat, but it seems that they intend to fully integrate us into the IBM mothership.
Years before '93-'96 when I worked at Kaleida [1], a joint venture of Apple and IBM, alongside Taligent [2] their AIM Alliance [3] sister company, I laughed at the old joke:
Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?
A: IBM.
But then the joke was on me when I finally worked for a company owned by Apple and IBM at the same time, and experienced it first hand!
I gave Lou Gerstner a DreamScape [4] demo involving an animated disembodied spinning bouncing eyeball, who commented "That's a bit too right-brained for me." I replied "Oh no, I should have used the other eyeball!"
Later when Sun was shopping itself around, there were rumors that IBM might buy it, so the joke would still apply to them, but it would have been a more dignified death than Oracle ending up lawnmowering [5] Sun, sigh.
Now that Apple's 15 times bigger than IBM, I bet the joke still applies, giving Apple a great reason NOT to merge with IBM.
As it happened with the other startups that were acquired by IBM, this too shall pass through the digestion system of the dinosaur and ejected out as a dump. Hashicorp products are showing the signs of a legacy thing already. IBM is the nursing home for these sort of aging stuff.
I'm a heavy user of Terraform and Vault products. Both do not belong to this era. Also worked for a startup acquired and dumped by IBM.
What are the modern equivalents? For Terraform I'd imagine it's Pulumi or OpenTofu but what is it for Vault? Last I checked OpenBao didn't seem to have much juice but it's been a minute since I did so. Or are there unrelated projects in this space that are on the same trajectory as Hashicorp was a decade ago?
What, in this era, replaces secrets handling in Kubernetes in a way thats easy for most devs to pick up?
What, in this era, replaces provisioning cloudy stuff that doesn't require heaps of YAML or a bootstrap Kubernetes cluster for operators to run within?
Most of the these type plays the home page has stacked toolbars / marketing / popups / announcements from the parent company and their branding everywhere (IBM XXX powered by Redhat)... I see very little IBM logo or corporate pop-up policy jank on redhat.com.
Yeap we did. I wrote it off around the time of the licence change, just after they decided to ditch the TF Team plan in favour of the utterly ridiculous “Resources Under Management” billing model.
I knew the company had lost the plot at that point.
These clowns want $2500 goddamned american dollars for the privilege of reading their bloviations on this topic, which i absolutely will not pay.
You know it's bad when the only people making money on this crap are management consultants.
Thinking back to 2014 using vagrant to develop services locally on my laptop I never would have imagined them getting swallowed up by big blue as some bizarre "AI" play. Shit is getting real weird around here.
> These clowns want $2500 goddamned american dollars for the privilege of reading their bloviations on this topic, which i absolutely will not pay.
You aren’t the target market for their “bloviations” - they are targeted at executives, and it isn’t like the executive pays this out of their own pocket, there is a budget and it comes out of the budget. Plus these reports generally aren’t aimed at technical people with significant pre-existing understanding of the field, their audience is more “I’m expected to make decisions about this topic but they didn’t cover it in my MBA”, or even “I need some convincing-sounding talking points to put in my slides for the board meeting, and if I cite an outside analyst they can’t argue with that”
Commonly with these reports a company buys a copy and then it can be freely shared within the company. Also $2,500 is likely just the list price and if you are a regular customer you’ll get a discount, or even find you’ve already paid for this report as part of some kind of subscription
This sort of thing is why nobody gives a shit about IBM anymore and they have to keep just buying relevant companies to stay relevant.
Hopefully they do the right thing and hand hashicorp over to Redhat so they can open source the shit out of it. So they can do things like make OpenTofu the proper upstream for it, etc.
Who the heck is IDC's customer base, exactly? $2,500 for that, or $7,500 for this one about – drumroll, please – feature flags!
"Modern digital businesses need to be able to adapt to changing end-user demand, and since feature flags decouple release from deployment, it provides a good solution for improving software development velocity and business agility," said Jim Mercer, program vice president of IDC Software Development DevOps and DevSecOps. "Further, feature flags can help derisk releases, enable product experimentation, and allow for targeting and personalizing end-user experiences."
In some ways to me it feels like a turning point for the GFC/ZIRP thru COVID era of tech companies with no path to profit.
After the haze of the LLM bubble passes, I hope startups have an exit strategy other than "we'll just get 0.01% of users to pay 6+ figures for support" or "ads".
Good tech deserves a good business model such that it can endure for the long term.
"HashiCorp's capabilities drive significant synergies across multiple strategic growth areas for IBM, including Red Hat, watsonx, data security, IT automation and Consulting"
The consolidation of power and IP into just several tech companies is worrying to me. Having the misfortune of working at IBM for just a few months, IBM leadership will give it the RedHat treatment. The dinosaurs at IBM will shelve their IP, and sell it for parts. Maybe Bloodmoar will buy up the rest and squeeze whatever remaining profit from acquisition.
If given the chance, just take the exit rather than trying to integrate into IBM.
One of my friends was in management at HashiCorp and what he told he was there were a series of bad internal promotions to product management and heads of development that tanked the company. At the same time there was a huge problem with leftist activist employees taking the company for hostage, not surprised they got scooped up for pennies on the dollar.
Turns out, nobody's quite figured out how to successfully charge for free shit, but it's moot when you can just burn venture capital for ten years until you get acquired and chopped for parts.
Nomad is way easier to self-manage than K8s, but GCP does that for me, with all the compliance boxes checked, for extremely cheap. Every cloud provider is in that boat. Nomad will be more work and more money, be it compute or enterprise fees. I'm sticking with k8s.
I agree up to a certain scale. I've managed a large Nomad/Consul setup (multiple clusters, geographically separated), and it was nothing but a nightmare. I believe fly.io had a similar experience.
Definitely not better than Kubernetes, but I don't regret working on it and I like it as a simpler alternative to Kubernetes. I remember trying to hire people for it and not a single person ever even heard of it.
So, what is the practical TL;DR for everyone who isn't neither an employee nor investor? Hashicorp kinda made a lot of significant stuff, but that stuff is mostly FOSS and the commercial product is very niche. I am kinda surprised IBM even bought it, because it isn't very clear to me, how commercializeable this stuff is. So what does it mean? Will IBM most likely kill some FOSS products? Is this even possible? Were, say, terraform or nomad developed mostly by internal devs, or is there a solid enough community already to keep up with development or simply fork the tool if things go south?
IBM probably wants to bundle hashi products as part of their cloud offerings and can milk other cloud providers in licensing fees. All cloud providers support terraform and most current infrastructure is probably configured in HCL.
Some comments were deferred for faster rendering.
schmichael|1 year ago
I've only ever worked at startups before, but HashiCorp itself left that category when it IPO'd. Each phase is definitely different, but then again I don't want go back to roadmapping on a ridiculously small whiteboard in a terrible sub-leased office and building release binaries on my laptop. That was fun once, but I'm ready for a new phase in my own life. I've heard the horror stories of being acquired by IBM, but I've also heard from people who have reveled in the resources and opportunities. I'm hoping for the best for Nomad, our users, and our team. I'd like to think there's room in the world for multiple schedulers, and if not, it won't be for lack of trying.
thisisnotauser|1 year ago
Every IBM product I've ever used is universally reviled by every person I've met who also had to use it, without exaggeration in the slightest. If anything, I'm understating it: I make a significant premium on my salary because I'm one of the few people willing to put up with it.
My only expectation here is that I'll finally start weaning myself off terraform, I guess.
spicyusername|1 year ago
I worked for a company acquired by IBM, and we held hope like you are doing, but it was only a matter of time before the benefit cuts, layoffs, and death of the pre-existing culture.
Your best bet is to quit right after the acquisition and hope they give you a big retention package to stay. These things are pretty common to ease acquisition transitions and the packages can be massive, easily six figures. Then when the package pays out you can leave for good.
jonathanoliver|1 year ago
I know there are horror stories around this acquisition and lots of predictions about what will happen, but only time will tell. On a minimum, it has been a delight to use the Hashicorp software stack along with the approach they brought to our engineering workflow (remember Vagrant?). These innovations and approaches aren't going away.
dramm|1 year ago
chippiewill|1 year ago
There are worse companies to get bought by, but if you've only ever worked at startups then you're not likely to enjoy what this becomes.
ddreier|1 year ago
Regardless of the general sentiment, hoping for the best outcome for all of you.
m1keil|1 year ago
heipei|1 year ago
superjared|1 year ago
morkalork|1 year ago
proxysna|1 year ago
linuxftw|1 year ago
No matter what they tell you, your day to day will not improve. For my area, it was mostly business as usual, but a net decrease in comp because IBM's ESPP is trash.
parasense|1 year ago
Hrun0|1 year ago
ants_everywhere|1 year ago
Then they did the license change, which didn't reflect well on them.
Now it's being sold to IBM, which is essentially a consulting company trying to pivot to mostly undifferentiated software offerings. So I guess Hashicorp is basically over.
I suspect the various forks will be used for a while.
JohnMakin|1 year ago
There have been lifecycle rules in place for as long as I can remember to prevent stuff like this. I'm not sure this is a "problem" unique to terraform.
gue5t|1 year ago
SOLAR_FIELDS|1 year ago
infraking|1 year ago
I find this to be a very strange criticism and is probably indicative of a poor workflow or CI/CD system if anything.
XorNot|1 year ago
Except for not "feeling" secure, the only thing everyone wants is a Windows AD file share with ACLs.
Just no one realises this: all the Vault on disk encryption and unsealing stuff is irrelevant - it's solving a problem handled at an entirely different level.
jmclnx|1 year ago
Actually for me, the company I was at that IBM purchased was on the verge of folding, so in that case, IBM saved our jobs and I was there for many years.
hashicorporal|1 year ago
Now, we are actively hiring for numerous positions.
Personally, I am not planning to stay much longer. I had hoped that our corp structure would be similar to RedHat, but it seems that they intend to fully integrate us into the IBM mothership.
DonHopkins|1 year ago
Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?
A: IBM.
But then the joke was on me when I finally worked for a company owned by Apple and IBM at the same time, and experienced it first hand!
I gave Lou Gerstner a DreamScape [4] demo involving an animated disembodied spinning bouncing eyeball, who commented "That's a bit too right-brained for me." I replied "Oh no, I should have used the other eyeball!"
Later when Sun was shopping itself around, there were rumors that IBM might buy it, so the joke would still apply to them, but it would have been a more dignified death than Oracle ending up lawnmowering [5] Sun, sigh.
Now that Apple's 15 times bigger than IBM, I bet the joke still applies, giving Apple a great reason NOT to merge with IBM.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance
[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NytloOy7WM&t=323s
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246
zkmon|1 year ago
I'm a heavy user of Terraform and Vault products. Both do not belong to this era. Also worked for a startup acquired and dumped by IBM.
BrandoElFollito|1 year ago
So do you find Terraform and Vault good or bad? (sorry, not a native English speaker and I had problems to transcript the sentence)
alexjplant|1 year ago
nunez|1 year ago
What, in this era, replaces provisioning cloudy stuff that doesn't require heaps of YAML or a bootstrap Kubernetes cluster for operators to run within?
alsoforgotmypwd|1 year ago
bigfatkitten|1 year ago
glzone1|1 year ago
Some of this is obvious (linux and mainframes aren't a bad combo). Some of it I'm a bit surprised by (openshift revenue seems strong).
Probably already basically returned purchase price in revenue and much more than purchase price in market cap.
A noticeable thing is
https://www.redhat.com/en
Most of the these type plays the home page has stacked toolbars / marketing / popups / announcements from the parent company and their branding everywhere (IBM XXX powered by Redhat)... I see very little IBM logo or corporate pop-up policy jank on redhat.com.
dralley|1 year ago
febyewary|1 year ago
tzury|1 year ago
People who worked at companies acquired by IBM and could not afford going anywhere else.
A mixture of both will be involved from now on in decision making regarding your platform formation core products.
martinsnow|1 year ago
bravetraveler|1 year ago
commandersaki|1 year ago
threeseed|1 year ago
And Hashicorp are experts in HCL so I am sure they will love it.
inahga|1 year ago
I only correct you because it's an even bigger indictment of Notes that IBM switched off of it.
xocnad|1 year ago
tinyhouse|1 year ago
danw1979|1 year ago
I knew the company had lost the plot at that point.
yellow_lead|1 year ago
Not great for investors, but insiders benefitted a lot!
neom|1 year ago
kccqzy|1 year ago
asadm|1 year ago
daveguy|1 year ago
xyst|1 year ago
Retail will always be holding the bag. This is known.
intelVISA|1 year ago
febyewary|1 year ago
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jcgrillo|1 year ago
lmfao what the fuck? The source they reference: https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US51953724
These clowns want $2500 goddamned american dollars for the privilege of reading their bloviations on this topic, which i absolutely will not pay.
You know it's bad when the only people making money on this crap are management consultants.
Thinking back to 2014 using vagrant to develop services locally on my laptop I never would have imagined them getting swallowed up by big blue as some bizarre "AI" play. Shit is getting real weird around here.
skissane|1 year ago
You aren’t the target market for their “bloviations” - they are targeted at executives, and it isn’t like the executive pays this out of their own pocket, there is a budget and it comes out of the budget. Plus these reports generally aren’t aimed at technical people with significant pre-existing understanding of the field, their audience is more “I’m expected to make decisions about this topic but they didn’t cover it in my MBA”, or even “I need some convincing-sounding talking points to put in my slides for the board meeting, and if I cite an outside analyst they can’t argue with that”
Commonly with these reports a company buys a copy and then it can be freely shared within the company. Also $2,500 is likely just the list price and if you are a regular customer you’ll get a discount, or even find you’ve already paid for this report as part of some kind of subscription
lotharcable2|1 year ago
Hopefully they do the right thing and hand hashicorp over to Redhat so they can open source the shit out of it. So they can do things like make OpenTofu the proper upstream for it, etc.
yellow_lead|1 year ago
jaennaet|1 year ago
"Modern digital businesses need to be able to adapt to changing end-user demand, and since feature flags decouple release from deployment, it provides a good solution for improving software development velocity and business agility," said Jim Mercer, program vice president of IDC Software Development DevOps and DevSecOps. "Further, feature flags can help derisk releases, enable product experimentation, and allow for targeting and personalizing end-user experiences."
https://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=US52763824
ripcentos|1 year ago
carlwgeorge|1 year ago
steveBK123|1 year ago
After the haze of the LLM bubble passes, I hope startups have an exit strategy other than "we'll just get 0.01% of users to pay 6+ figures for support" or "ads".
Good tech deserves a good business model such that it can endure for the long term.
technick|1 year ago
zoobab|1 year ago
transitivebs|1 year ago
this sounds like corporate AI slop
febyewary|1 year ago
sudomateo|1 year ago
I met some great people along the way that I'm glad to have gotten the opportunity to work with. Godspeed all!
ChrisArchitect|1 year ago
westurner|1 year ago
master_crab|1 year ago
(Asking for a friend).
cube2222|1 year ago
In any case, make sure to reach out via the website chat widget / email / demo form, we’re happy to help!
The migration from Terraform to OpenTofu is pretty seamless right now, and documented in the OpenTofu docs[2].
[0]: https://github.com/spacelift-io/spacelift-migration-kit
[1]: https://spacelift.io/blog/how-to-migrate-from-terraform-clou...
[2]: https://opentofu.org/docs/intro/migration/
Disclaimer: work at Spacelift
xyst|1 year ago
If given the chance, just take the exit rather than trying to integrate into IBM.
dralley|1 year ago
As someone working at Red Hat since before the acquisition, this does not match my experience of "the Red Hat treatment" even a little bit.
I don't doubt that they've handled acquisitions badly in the past but they did a decent job leaving us alone.
delulu|1 year ago
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bdelmas|1 year ago
dimgl|1 year ago
subpixel|1 year ago
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vcryan|1 year ago
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AcerbicZero|1 year ago
ForHackernews|1 year ago
film42|1 year ago
sepositus|1 year ago
cowgoesmoo|1 year ago
For simple use cases, sure, but you could also just use AWS ECS or a similar cloud tool for an even easier experience.
lovehashbrowns|1 year ago
airplaneears|1 year ago
esseph|1 year ago
Salt and Puppet both don't seem in a great place.
System Initiative is just AWS still, yeah?
Welp.
danw1979|1 year ago
krick|1 year ago
pm90|1 year ago
delulu|1 year ago
hackburg|1 year ago
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mfreeman451|1 year ago
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ep103|1 year ago
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