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HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

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Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#13

> There’s company-wide alignment on delivering the best user experience possible. That means sales, marketing, product engineering, product design, and customer success all channel their efforts into creating a product that provides an unparalleled UX. Product development puts all departments on the same wavelength in terms of the end goal. Who the fuck are they talking about? Clearly not HashiCorp. The most popular…

I'm assuming you are talking about terraform?

The UX of all the other hashi products I've used have been absolutely sublime compared to the industry equivalents. Nomad compared to kubernetes is a particularly stark contrast.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#14

Article is locked to members but the part that isn't doesn't convince me much.

The narrative is hard to buy into when they've lost >50% of their value since IPO so far. I can buy they are doing awesome in the abstract sense, but ...

Not $600B. Yeah.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#15
post #5
post #4

Although there's a paywall towards the bottom (is it 25%, 60%, 90% through the article, who can tell?), the above-the-fold resonates and is a reasonable narrative about HashiCorp's success. Certainly HashiCorp shines in the UX department. That said, I think there's a another angle: HashiCorp is provider agnostic. HashiCorp tooling naturally lends itself to a multi-cloud strategy because they aren't owned by a cloud p…

Kubernetes is managed by a foundation so less of a risk than a tool owned by one company.

Kubernetes absolutely eats the HashiStack lunch. I think they’re aware of this. That’s why I think HashiCorp invested so much VC funding into their SaaS offerings: they know consul, vault, and nomad are a huge pain in the ass to configure and manage, particularly in support of each other.

It’s all a little bit more agnostic than k8s but If you actually run consul + vault + nomad in production you know that managing it and repairing it can be a nightmare. GKE or EKS on the other hand feels like I almost shouldn’t even have a job.

In fact, two of the most high profile outages in the last two years(Robinhood March 2020 and whatever Roblox outage happened recently) we’re due to consul or vault or something going completely hare brained.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#16
post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kubernetes is managed by a foundation so less of a risk than a tool owned by one company.

I think one way in which it plays out opposite to this is that Kubernetes, among companies I’ve talked to, is being deployed as EKS or GKE with cloud provider specific extensions/integrations while Nomad is much much easier to self manage on top of bare VMs. Even being owned by a single company, there is something about being to self host that feels more “free”. Obviously this could make a 180 easily because of how m…

Wanting to turn on just one more server to find months of lead time and a bunch of red tape to get stuff done, yeah I don't miss "owning the hardware" one bit. In times of economic hardship when finding skilled labor to manage infrastructure is easier to achieve, trading hardware costs for labor costs may make more sense, but I don't see that happening in today's economies for most western economies.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#17

> There’s company-wide alignment on delivering the best user experience possible. That means sales, marketing, product engineering, product design, and customer success all channel their efforts into creating a product that provides an unparalleled UX. Product development puts all departments on the same wavelength in terms of the end goal. Who the fuck are they talking about? Clearly not HashiCorp. The most popular…

> The most popular tool in HashiCorp's ecosystem that wasn't written by them was written by a consulting firm who hated HashiCorp's UX Which tool is that? On a related note, Vault has a really excellent API. A joy.

I'm assuming this is Terragrunt, which itself perpetuates all kinds of horrific practices which are absolutely unnecessary if you apply basic software engineering principles to infrastructure as code/config.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#18

Article is locked to members but the part that isn't doesn't convince me much.

The narrative is hard to buy into when they've lost >50% of their value since IPO so far. I can buy they are doing awesome in the abstract sense, but ...

> The narrative is hard to buy into when they've lost >50% of their value since IPO so far.

Many companies on NASDAQ have lost 50% of their value in that time window. It just happened to co-incide with a global downturn.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#19

> There’s company-wide alignment on delivering the best user experience possible. That means sales, marketing, product engineering, product design, and customer success all channel their efforts into creating a product that provides an unparalleled UX. Product development puts all departments on the same wavelength in terms of the end goal. Who the fuck are they talking about? Clearly not HashiCorp. The most popular…

> The most popular tool in HashiCorp's ecosystem that wasn't written by them was written by a consulting firm who hated HashiCorp's UX Which tool is that? On a related note, Vault has a really excellent API. A joy.

Vault is excellent.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#20

> There’s company-wide alignment on delivering the best user experience possible. That means sales, marketing, product engineering, product design, and customer success all channel their efforts into creating a product that provides an unparalleled UX. Product development puts all departments on the same wavelength in terms of the end goal. Who the fuck are they talking about? Clearly not HashiCorp. The most popular…

All of HashiCorp's products have splendid UX — what are you on about? Have you actually used their other products aside from Terraform, which I'm assuming you're referring to?
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