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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

#191

Post by neurostimulant »

rank0 wrote: post #94
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.

I don’t understand people’s beef with IBM. They have been responsible for incredible R&D within computing. I even LIKE redhat/fedora! HashiCorp had already been sold out since waaaay before this acquisition and I also don’t understand why their engineers are seen as “special”…

It was special when Mitchell Hashimoto was still at the helm.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#192

Post by dralley »

calgoo wrote: post #163
dralley wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IBM didn't kill CentOS.

They where under IBM ownership at the time, so IBM did kill it. The software now branded as CentOS is basically Fedora, which is fine for desktops, but never felt good on servers. CentOS was perfect for a lot of us SysAdmins back in the day to use on our own servers etc, while using Red Hat at work. We also used it for anything PoC or servers that did not require support. These days licensing is easier using models l…

I work at Red Hat. IBM was not involved in the decision to kill CentOS.

>The software now branded as CentOS is basically Fedora

CentOS Stream (what replaced CentOS) is vastly more similar to CentOS than Fedora.

It's CentOS with rolling patches instead of bundling those same patches into minor releases every 6 months. Only the release model is different from RHEL / CentOS, otherwise it's built the same and holds to the same policies in terms of testing, how updates are handled and compatibility.

Fedora on the other hand is very, very different. Packages are built with different flags, different defaults (e.g. filesystems), very different package versions, a different package update policy (even within one major release Fedora is much more aggressive than CentOS Stream / RHEL / CentOS), etc.

I understand that not having an near-exact replica of RHEL supported for 10 years was very convenient and the way the EOL was announced, and the timelines, sucked massively. But CentOS Stream is suitable for a large number of the use cases where CentOS was used previously, it is not "basically Fedora". It's more like 98% RHEL-like wheras Fedora is doing something else entirely.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#193

Post by skywhopper »

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.

It was this, but hasn’t been for a couple of years at least. The culture really shifted once it was clear the pivot to becoming a SaaS-forward company wasn’t taking off. As soon as the IPO happened and even a little bit before, it felt like the place was being groomed down from somewhere unique and innovative to a standardized widget that would be attractive to enterprise-scale buyers like VMware or IBM.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#194

Post by deadbunny »

sureglymop wrote: post #164
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.

Regarding Red Hat, I dearly hope someone will replace the slow complicated mess that is ansible. It's crazy that this seems to be the best there is...

Saltstack is IMO superior to Ansible. It uses ZMQ for command and control. You can write everything in python if you want but the default is YAML + JINJA2. And is desired state not procedural.

Not used it for about 5 years and I think they got bought by VMWare IIRC. The only downside is that Ansible won the mindshare so you're gonna be more on your own when it comes to writing esoteric formulas.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#195

Post by janosdebugs »

djbusby wrote: post #190
janosd wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Is it because secondSlice is a reference (pointer?) to firstSlice?

Yes-ish? Slices are this weird construct where they sometimes behave like references and sometimes not. When I read the explanation, it always makes sense, but when using them it doesn't. For me the rule is: don't reuse slices and don't modify them unless you are the "owner" of the slice. Appending to a slice that was returned to you from a function is usually a pretty good way to have a fun afternoon debugging.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#196

Post by NomDePlum »

janosdebugs wrote: post #183
NomDePlum wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not the parent, but I find that doing dependency injection or defensive programming results in a lot of boilerplate. Custom error types are extemely wordy. The language also doesn't allow for storing metadata with types, only on structs as tags, which seriously hampers the ability to generate code. For example, you can't really express the concept of a slice in a slice containing an integer needing validation metadat…

My experience of Golang is that dependency injection doesn't really have much benefit. It felt like a square peg in a round hole exercise when my team considered it. The team was almost exclusively Java/Typescript Devs so it was something that we thought we needed but I don't believe we actually missed once we decided to not pursue it.

If you are looking at OpenAPI in Golang I can recommend having a look at https://goa.design/. It's a DSL that generates OpenAPI specs and provides an implementation of the endpoints described. Can also generate gRPC from the same definitions.

We found this removed the need to write almost all of the API layer and a lot of the associated validation. We found the generated code including the server element to be production ready from the get go.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#197

Post by skywhopper »

cjk2 wrote: post #179
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 t…

When a massive ecosystem springs up around a product, that means it’s wildly successful, actually.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#198

Post by glenngillen »

kevindamm wrote: post #153
mywittyname wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the licensing changes? I see a lot of references to it as though it was common knowledge, but I'm not aware of them. Edit: found something: https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/hashicorp-adopts-business-sou...

Yeah, they went from a more permissive license (Mozilla MPL) to a less permissive one (BUSL) but I can kind of understand why. I can also understand why the OSS community is upset, and after Hashicorp went after OpenTOFU recently, I'm siding more with the OSS community here. Before the license change, another project (Pulumi) built something that was basically a thin wrapper on Terraform and some convenient functiona…

It’s been widely speculated, months ago when the change happened, that Terraform has become the scapegoat for this licensing change. The actual impetus was IBM reselling Vault. IBM then helped push the OSS fork of Vault (OpenBao) and this acquisition just brings this whole license change thing to a convenient conclusion for IBM.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#199

Post by aaomidi »

renegade-otter wrote: post #181
NomDePlum wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I am not used to writing code where 2/3 of it is "if err" statements. Also, refactoring my logging statements so I could see the chain of events seemed like work I rarely had to do in other languages. It's a language the designers of which - with ALL due respect - clearly have not built a modern large application in decades.

Yes because other language just hide errors from the user.

I think the reason people find go a bit annoying with the error condition is because go actually treats errors as a primary thought, not an after thought like Python, Java.

Re: IBM to buy HashiCorp in $6.4B deal

#200

Post by dapf »

dontdoxxme wrote: post #185
alecsm wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why slow and complicated? We're just starting to implement it and we've only heard good things about it.

Ansible is great if you have workflows where sysadmins SSH to servers manually. It can pretty much take that workflow and automate it. The problem is it doesn’t go much beyond that, so you’re limited by SSH roundtrip latency and it’s a pain to parallelize (you end up either learning lots of options or mitogen can help). However fundamentally you’re still SSHing to machines, when really at scale you want some kind of…

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