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HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

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Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#61

Post by austinjp »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #46

Open source rules the world. A lot of people use HashiCorp's OSS products; not a lot pay for them. I certainly haven't and I don't think I've ever met a paying Hashicorp customer even though I know lots of people that use their products. They are a consulting business ultimately. And like many such companies they thrive on complexity. They are doomed to become part of the problem they are trying to solve. If they suc…

> If they succeed in their mission, the result is OSS software that is so simple to use that nobody needs their consulting services.

If that comes to pass I think that's okay, even admirable.

Not every company needs to keep growing and growing, trying to take over the world. Not every company needs to continue in perpetuity.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#62

Post by busterarm »

mixedCase wrote: post #41
datatrashfire wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terragrunt is an antipattern. Made the mistake once with a very poorly structured project I inherited, never again.

Terragrunt is not an anti-pattern, but it is a tool that is easier to get wrong than Terraform and so people create great messes with it. Used right it's the only way to remain sane on any non-trivial set of infra where you don't end up hand-rolling a half-baked version of Terragrunt.

Managing 10^5 servers right now with Terragrunt. Can confirm, it's the only way to stay sane.

Getting to this point was a learning process though. Probably six solid years of investment now.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#63

Post by raffraffraff »

yomkippur wrote: post #58
raffraffraff wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps it doesn't apply to your situation, but that happens if you need to build 5 more copies of your current setup? The CDK stuff would be fine as long as your code is DRY, but all that clicking on the console... Also, can other people understand and extend your infrastructure? (Honest questions)

you are describing different scenarios here with different scope and i did not say to use web console only

I literally said "The CDK stuff would be fine as long as your code is DRY, but all that clicking on the console..." So I was asking specifically about the console parts. If you had to redo it again or repeat it a number of times, wouldn't you prefer if it was code and not clicks?

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#64

Post by thayne »

datatrashfire wrote: post #30
Axsuul wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I don't understand why some people hate teraform so much.

Terraform is great... until you hit one of it's many limitations, or run into a bug in a provider that really ruins your day.

Plenty of people probably never run into those problems. But if you do, it's pretty terrible.

To be fair, there isn't really anything better. Pulumi and CDK address some of the limitations by using a "real" programming language, but introduce different issues. And bugs in providers are probably unavoidable, and are partly the fault of poor APIs from cloud providers.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#65

Post by Koffiepoeder »

DannyBee wrote: post #12
yellow_lead wrote: post #3

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 ...

If you look at their EBITDA and EPS and compare with their growth, future is not looking all to bright. They either are going to have to massively cut expenses (thereby potentially losing their R&D advantage), increase their conversions/sales or greatly raise their prices. Not saying that it's not possible, but it's a high risk bet to be fair. Nevertheless, a stock with a great upwards potential if they execute rightly. But that's a big if.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#66

Post by cube2222 »

lapser wrote: post #36
datatrashfire wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand why some people hate teraform so much.

Because it sucks. It has all the quirks and a whole lot of mess. That's terraform. Terraform Enterprise and Cloud must have been developed as a fuck you to enterprises, because it absolutely sucks. I work with them daily, and have done so for 4 years now. It still sucks. Unfortunately it's (Terraform, not TFE/TFC) the best in its class, and quite frankly I'm not smart to solve its issues.

If you're having a bad time with TFC/TFE, make sure to check out Spacelift[0].

We're striving to build a product that's both highly customizable and has a good UX, improving on many of the pain points. The migration path is straightforward and it'd be great to hear what you think about it!

[0]: https://spacelift.io

Disclaimer: Software Engineer at Spacelift

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#67

Post by lifeisstillgood »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #46

Open source rules the world. A lot of people use HashiCorp's OSS products; not a lot pay for them. I certainly haven't and I don't think I've ever met a paying Hashicorp customer even though I know lots of people that use their products. They are a consulting business ultimately. And like many such companies they thrive on complexity. They are doomed to become part of the problem they are trying to solve. If they suc…

I think you may be surprised.

There are very very large companies that surprisingly have hashicorp products deep in their central core - Vault is an obvious one.

At the heart of all huge companies are InfoSec and architects looking for a solution they can trust will scale - and what better than the OSS product they have hands on experience with.

It might not be profitable in Microsoft terms, but then again we won't see musicians earning like the Rolling Stones anymore. Open Source chnaged the software publishing game just like internet chnaged music,

But there is enough profit out there.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#68

Post by erik_seaberg »

sshine wrote: post #57
hericium wrote: post #45

Vault is great. But if I were to start learning Terraform now, I'd probably ditch it in favor of Pulumi. Terraform was supposed to make writing DRY easy. It's often more reasonable to copy-paste parts of configuration than to try make it DRY. HashiCorp seems to have the approach of "if something can be hacked around, even in a very convoluted way, we can ignore any feature requests for that thing to be doable in a no…

I find that HCL (Terraform's declarative resource specification format) is an excellent target for a compiler for a DRY description of my resources. :-D

HCL doesn’t interop with anything. In a moment of weakness I once generated HCL using M4 (because passing a DynamoDB key schema into a module used to be impossible), but now I think it’s better to generate the JSON equivalents they also parse.

Their gRPC API for plugins looks pretty tough, and I keep hoping for an SDK for custom resources that doesn’t require writing Go.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#69

Post by dilyevsky »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #46

Open source rules the world. A lot of people use HashiCorp's OSS products; not a lot pay for them. I certainly haven't and I don't think I've ever met a paying Hashicorp customer even though I know lots of people that use their products. They are a consulting business ultimately. And like many such companies they thrive on complexity. They are doomed to become part of the problem they are trying to solve. If they suc…

I worked for a shop that payed them for enterprise licenses, it was $$$ and imo the experience had been subpar. That was number of years ago so hopefully support has seen some improvement with all that extra IPO capital... That managed to capture a huge mindshare across all levels of infrastructure devs so that ought to be worth something.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#70

Post by dilyevsky »

busterarm wrote: post #62
mixedCase wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Terragrunt is not an anti-pattern, but it is a tool that is easier to get wrong than Terraform and so people create great messes with it. Used right it's the only way to remain sane on any non-trivial set of infra where you don't end up hand-rolling a half-baked version of Terragrunt.

Managing 10^5 servers right now with Terragrunt. Can confirm, it's the only way to stay sane. Getting to this point was a learning process though. Probably six solid years of investment now.

From experience terragrunt + atlantis has been much better experience than hashicorp's own terraform enterprise service.
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