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Announcing HashiCorp (a Company for Vagrant)

206 points| Argorak | 13 years ago |hashicorp.com

62 comments

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[+] mitchellh|13 years ago|reply
I'm here to answer any questions, if you have them. I'm really excited!

Fun fact, I first "launched" Vagrant on HN almost exactly 1000 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901

[+] blhack|13 years ago|reply
http://vagrantup.com/

A bit of constructive criticism:

The "this changes everything" thing has become way, way, overplayed. I saw that and immediately rolled my eyes and stopped reading. It is about at the level of "code ninja" now.

[+] LeafStorm|13 years ago|reply
Will it be possible to run development VMs in VirtualBox and production VMs in vSphere with the same Vagrantfile?
[+] aashay|13 years ago|reply
Maybe this is a stupid question, but how do you pronounce HashiCorp? Is it "HAA-she" (rhymes with Kashi, like the cereal) or is it "HASH-i" (rhymes with "flashy")? I'm guessing it's the former since it'd match the Japanese pronunciation of your last name...?
[+] stukpixel1|13 years ago|reply
Vagrant was amazingly helpful for my dev work this summer. Good to hear that you're making its development a priority.

I suppose my only question is if you plan on redesigning the Vagrant Docs website to be more like your attractive company landing page.

[+] lyaunzbe|13 years ago|reply
Congratulations Mitchell! I have always admired your work and it is inspiring to see an such an evolution in your project. Kudos to whoever designed the site, it looks amazing!
[+] peralta|13 years ago|reply
First of all: congrats! I have been using Vagrant for a while now and it's how we manage the development and test environments (+200) in the company I work at (tuenti.com).

It is still not clear to me what the business model will be: will you be charging for selling extra providers (like VMWare Fusion), support contracts or ...?

[+] rbolkey|13 years ago|reply
Congratulations as well! I've been using Vagrant mainly as a testing platform for authoring Puppet modules, and it's been wonderful.
[+] gerad|13 years ago|reply
What's Vagrant?
[+] nigelk|13 years ago|reply
Great news Mitch! Congratulations, and give us a yell if I can help with anything.
[+] joedevon|13 years ago|reply
Congrats! I'll hit you up about potentially setting up a training in Los Angeles.
[+] ramereth|13 years ago|reply
Congrats on launching your new company! Best of luck!
[+] orangethirty|13 years ago|reply
Use a backpacker for the mascot. It matches what the product does better. Homeless people dont have much stuff. Backpackers have and take their stuff everywhere. Which is the spirit of what you are doing. Have your stuff avaiable everywhere. So, a backpacker.
[+] dekz|13 years ago|reply
I'm having trouble understanding your recommendation. Vagrants take ALL of their belongings with them, they have little where else to store any items they. Backpackers couldn't possibly take everything they own with them or they would by definition be Vagrants.

I think having a Vagrant as the mascot for Vagrant is the only obvious option.

[+] lixef|13 years ago|reply
@mitchellh Congratulations first! As I've been reading your tweets I've been guessing that you would starting, which focuses you on Vagrant.

I have a few questions: When did you think about the first time and when did you really decide to do this step? How do you start? Bootstrap it by your own or try to go with for a VC? How are you planning the addon open source/paid addon ratio will be like?

I wish you all the best for your company. And because I've been using Vagrant every day: Thank you very much.

[+] mitchellh|13 years ago|reply
> When did you think about the first time and when did you really decide to do this step?

The inkling of a possibility of something like this only entered my head around March/April 2012. I committed to the idea in June 2012.

> How do you start? Bootstrap it by your own or try to go with for a VC?

I'm attempting to bootstrap it on my own for now, because I think I have a solid foundation so there is a clear line to revenue. Of course, my runway to do this is much shorter than if I had VC funding. On the other hand, I have a lot more freedom without VC funding.

> How are you planning the addon open source/paid addon ratio will be like?

There will be many more open source add-ons, and I think it should be this way.

Thank YOU for using Vagrant. :)

[+] paulsmith|13 years ago|reply
Can the first order of business be a renaming so the mascot of a useful and widely-used product isn't a homeless person?
[+] mitchellh|13 years ago|reply
The project won't be renamed, but it will be rebranded in the next few weeks. In the three years the project has existed I have only gotten two or three complaints about the mascot, but everyone has agreed that "Vagrant" itself is fine. Note that I've talked up to some pretty high levels of US government using Vagrant, and most are okay with it. One [fairly large/visible] organization within the US government has said they can't use it until the mascot is changed.

Vince the Vagrant is being retired.

[+] shizcakes|13 years ago|reply
Where can I go to find more information about Vagrant's plans for supporting more hypervisors than Virtualbox?
[+] Hupo|13 years ago|reply
Congrats! I should probably get around to actually testing Vagrant one of these days too...

Also, the website looks absolutely gorgeous. Fantastic work there.

[+] trotsky|13 years ago|reply
good luck! vagrant seems to fit a sweet spot in real world configuration management needs. i look forward to a future independent of oracle.
[+] ecspike|13 years ago|reply
Came here to say hi and congrats Mitchell. Was fun hanging out in CZ, we should do it again, this time, stateside.
[+] dreamdu5t|13 years ago|reply
Vagrant is a VirtualBox with a bunch of packages pre-installed? Am I correct?
[+] pearkes|13 years ago|reply
Nope - Vagrant is a tool for managing VM providers.

Virtualbox has been the main provider it manages. Part of this announcement includes adding support for more providers!

[+] TallGuyShort|13 years ago|reply
If you frequently use VMs I suggest you checkout the example on their front page - it's super fast and I've found Vagrant to make a HUGE impact on my productivity and ability to use VMs for their intended purpose.
[+] minikomi|13 years ago|reply
Just a heads up: Your favicon is almost identical to http://gree-corp.com/ , big social game maker in Japan.
[+] cheapsteak|13 years ago|reply
It's a cube

Surely you can't trademark a cube?

[+] kanwisher|13 years ago|reply
Any plans for helping unit test vm creation? One of the biggest problems I've had is trying to verify that my Chef installation works after each change
[+] regularfry|13 years ago|reply
Excellent. I've been watching Vagrant from the sidelines. It's looking great, but it's useless to me until it gets a KVM backend.
[+] ukd1|13 years ago|reply
Congratulations and best of luck Mitchell!
[+] heyadam|13 years ago|reply
Congrats! Looking forward to see how Vagrant grows over the next couple years.