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IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

reuters.com

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Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#171

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

bluGill wrote: post #57
belter wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This type of comment appears here every time the name IBM shows up, but it is more symptomatic, of the bubble a part of HN lives on. Think every core IT infra of most of the developed world countries, most of the ebanking and core messaging infra of your large banks and insurance companies, plus billions per year in consulting services revenue. https://www.ibm.com/products https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_IBM_pr…

It is more than IBM used to be a big name in areas where hackers would be expected to be. They have left all those behind though. there are lots of other companies that none of us would recognize that are big, but IBM is a name that we all know as once somewhat important who now are not.

Uhm, the term “hacker” in this context, is, itself, just a coded way of saying “cool developer in the same circles as me”.

Again, HN users are in a bubble, and HN users think that they’re very trendy.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#172

Post by op00to »

solardev wrote: post #35

I didn't know IBM still had money to throw around like that. What do they even do these days? Who are their customers?

IBM is essentially a large bank with a side business of tech. IBM is known for financially complex deals that are highly lucrative. They make their money by taking advantage of inefficiencies in the largest enterprises purchasing and technology teams.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#174

Post by janosd »

hpeter wrote: post #127
renegade-otter wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hashi code, such as Terraform, was (is) an amazing example of a good reference Go codebase. It was very hard for me to get into Go because, outside of the language trivia and hype, it was hard to learn about the patterns and best practices needed for building even a mid-sized application.

That's interesting. I found Go to be a very productive and easy language, coming from Typescript. But I had a similar experience like yours with PHP, I just couldn't get into it.

After having written probably over 100k lines of Go code, my impression is that Go is simple, but not easy. The language has very few features to learn, but that results in a lot of boilerplate code and there are more than a few footguns burried in the language itself. (My favorite [1])

I find it very hard to write expressive, easy to read code and more often than not I see people using massive switch-case statements and other, hard to maintain patterns instead of abstracting away things because it's so painful to create abstractions. (The Terraform/OpenTofu codebase is absolutely guilty of this btw, there is a reason why it's over 300k lines of code. There is a lot of procedural code in there with plenty of hidden global scope, so getting anything implemented that touches multiple parts typically requires a lot of contortions.)

It's not a bad language by any stretch, but there are things it is good at and things it is not really suited for.

[1]: [link redacted]

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#175

Post by NomDePlum »

renegade-otter wrote: post #151
hpeter wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's interesting. I found Go to be a very productive and easy language, coming from Typescript. But I had a similar experience like yours with PHP, I just couldn't get into it.

I find the claims that Go is easy just wrong. It's actually a harder language to write in because without discipline, you are going to end up maintaining massive amounts of boilerplate. That's from someone who did a bunch - Perl, Ruby, Python, Java, C++, Scala. Syntax is one thing, assembling an application with maintainable code is something else.

What in particular did you find difficult building a maintainable codebase in Golang? Not quite understanding the boilerplate reference.

Code generation in Golang is something I've found removed a lot of boilerplate.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#176

Post by cqqxo4zV46cp »

czbond wrote: post #45
onlyrealcuzzo wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM had ~$14B cash to start the year. Additionally, you don't need the full purchase price in cash to buy the company. You can do leveraged buyouts, etc.

IBM M&A person: "We'd like to buy you in all IBM stock! " Hopefully someone at HashiCorp: "Hell no, cash please"

Ugh, and have you actually looked at IBM’e share price? Or is it this because IBM isn’t cool to you? A bit rich for a community that’ll go work for shares in some dinky web app startup.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#177

Post by objektif »

dbalatero wrote: post #132
dzonga wrote: post #124

funny how these things are sometimes. technically, couldn't have IBM have hired Mitch when he was still doing vagrant ? and put him in a closet somewhere. Given how Mitch, cranks out products -- could technically been cheaper than 6.4bn but then again IBM ain't hurting for cash.

> technically, couldn't have IBM have hired Mitch when he was still doing vagrant ? That sort of vision/foresight seems fairly rare, I'd think particularly rare at an IBM type place.

It is extremely rare I would say. Also when you can buy a proven product why risk?

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#178

Post by kevindamm »

_akhe wrote: post #159

Question: Is the tldr of companies like these that they sell enterprise server software? And often own the hardware too (data centers)? And then sell a bunch of consulting services on top of that to Fortune 500s and governments? It's tempting to think "How are these guys even relevant anymore?" but IBM's making $60B+ a year with over $10B cash on hand, apparently from mostly "consulting services". For a lot of develo…

Terraform does help with managing medium-large fleets, and a lot of special sauce is the structured types corresponding to cloud platforms (dubbed "providers") and the different services they offer. You could write your own configuration language and launcher but Terraform has been tested against many setups and can manage rolling restarts and other deployment methods. It's modular so you can define the configuration of a single server and then say "bring up 20 of these, use this docker image, name them thus," etc.

Vault for securely storing keys is also a convenient system component.

Both can be spun up in production without having to go through Hashicorp directly, but they also offer a service for managing the current state of the deployment (some aspects of the system are not queried at runtime and must be kept in a lock file of sorts, and coordinated with others doing any production changes). Some teams will coordinate using an S3 folder or some other ACL'd shared storage instead of relying on Hashicorp Cloud.

I find it's the closest thing to a public version of the service management tools I grew used to within Google, and it has been a driving force for the DevOps movement. I think something else could come along and do it better but it does seem like a lot of upkeep to retain parity with all the cloud services' products. I hope OpenTofu is successful, competition helps.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#179

Post by cjk2 »

calgoo wrote: post #49

Well, it was nice while it lasted! HashiCorp always felt like a company made by actual engineers, not "bean counters". Now it will just be another cog in the IBM machine, slowly grinding it down, removing everything attractive, just like RedHat and CentOS. Hopefully this will create a new wave off innovation, and someone will create something to replace the monopoly on IaC that IBM now owns.

My personal opinion is it was a company for crack monkeys. Consul, Vault and Packer have been nothing but pain and misery for me over the last few years. The application of these technologies has been nothing but a loss of ROI and sanity on a promise.

And don't get me started on Terraform, which is a promise but rarely delivers. It's bad enough that a whole ecosystem appeared around it (like terragrunt) to patch up the holes in it.

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