Don’t understand why anyone would need their cloud products. Who needs Terraform or Nomad or Vault as a service?
Who needs RDS? You can host your own database instance. Who needs VPSes? Just run bare metal. Who needs S3? Host your own files.
HashiCorp IPO today
111–120 of 206 posts
Re: HashiCorp IPO today
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know a single person who prefers HCL over literally anything else, but still, it's a happy day for them so I won't air my entitled little complaints and instead say: thank you hashicorp! You made life as a cloud infra beard better for a while, and I wish you all success going onwards.
I've come full circle on this and actually like HCL now. It's so limiting that there's often only one (or a few at most) way to feasibly do something. This is kinda painful when your team is small, but becomes a net-positive in a larger team.
I definitely have hit a few pain-points but I share your view. JSON/YAML are too primitive (and YAML's treacherous magic behaviours are downright hazardous) but a general-purpose programming language gives a lot of room to make hard-to-understand or non-deterministic code.
I've gotten a ton of value out of Fabric (this is in no way a criticism of Jeff's great work) but I've seen multiple projects where people took at advantage of everything they could do in Python and made a deployment system which is as much of a project to maintain as the code it deployed. There are only so many teams disciplined enough to avoid that and I think the declarative approach avoids many of those pitfalls, critically dependent on providing a sufficiently rich set of abstractions.
Re: HashiCorp IPO today
#113Earlier quoted context omitted.
That seems… cynical. The sorts of processes and. Management needed for a larger company are different than those at a small one. You need more process. There’s no way around it.
I really would like to challenge this. There’s many times no need, but busywork have to feed busywork.
If you're at a large company, the only thing worse than dealing with processes is dealing with the chaos you have in the absence of processes with everyone running around doing their own thing. (Obviously there can be bad process as well.)
Re: HashiCorp IPO today
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes I think they'll do quite well, might be worth investing.
not at their current valuation.
Exactly. The pre-IPO investors and employees will sell some of their shares now to take their profits in as retail now buys HCP at these prices, at a time of lots of uncertainty and 'fear' in the markets as of 9 Dec 2021. [0]
I'm expecting it to rise due to retail investor hype. I would avoid it for now at these prices at this time. We'll see after this period of uncertainty and after the lockup period expiring in 180 days after the IPO.
Re: HashiCorp IPO today
#115I think Hashicorp will enter monitoring next. Netdata would be a great fit (OSS, fat agent, huge metric granularity, deep infra and network insights)
prometheus is amazing though, would be hard to pull me off that
Re: HashiCorp IPO today
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're like Docker for DevOps? > ...a common confusion is multi-cloud vs. multi-vendor services. The latter is way more common, especially at smaller companies. Tools like Terraform are often touted as "multi-cloud" and people ask questions like "Why would I use Terraform if I use only AWS?" And the easy answer to that is tools like Terraform allow you to manage anything with an API as code. For example: do you want…
Multi-cloud is a nice idea, but not for everyone. Where i'm at it has been SQL Server for the last 12 years and now Azure for cloud services. It's highly unlikely that will change for the next 10 years. And almost equally unlikely that Terraform will be used instead of ARM templates and Bicep.
Cannot agree with this more.
Single cloud has a few extraordinary benefits for slow moving organizations.
Once you hang up the sign and declare "we are an xxx shop" it becomes an extraordinarily effective tool to drag unsophisticated employees and departments into the future.
"Microsoft said we have to do this so we have to" overcomes a LOT of internal barriers to technical change.
The biggest problems are never technology in large organizations, it's the humans beings anxiously protecting their overpaid managerial role. Single cloud is amazingly effective at improving the human factor.
At more sophisticated places with a bigger human appetite for innovation of course it's a different story.
Re: HashiCorp IPO today
#117Earlier quoted context omitted.
I really like Vault as a stand-alone architectural solution fwiw. Great tool. I’ve seen interest increasing in Nomad lately as well. More conversations about it. Terraform has a huge following though.
k8s won, it's kind of madness not to get onboard at this point. Yes, sure, you can do the 'same things' (almost) with nomad apparently less complexity, but k8s isn't anywhere as hard as it was a year or two ago today..
Nomad is the BetaMax of container orchestration. Better quality than K8s in a lot of ways (supposedly), but there's no ecosystem around it so it's a moot point. Want a continuous delivery system that plugs into Nomad a la ArgoCD or Spinnaker? Or a serverless platform that can run on top of it. Or access to people that know how to use it. Be prepared to write your own Nomad bindings and train your team on it.
Re: HashiCorp IPO today
#118Honestly I’m kinda not a huge fan of Hashicorp these days. They’re super late to managed services and they’re incredibly expensive.
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Re: HashiCorp IPO today
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
At my company, they don't want to deploy OSS Vault on prem. Apparently we need the enterprise edition, because it is easier for our operations team.
Having used vault quite a lot, I'm not really sold on it. Do you see any value in this tool? I've done the whole sidecar mess, middle of the night three keys unlock like we're arming a nuclear weapon and everything, and most of the time it's just been a total faff and imo security theatre vs actual security. End of the day, the secrets are being written to a .properties file or /proc/ /env somewhere anyway and can be…
If you don’t need the Shamir part of Vault, create fewer key shares.
If you integrate properly throughout the stack (i.e “not being negligent”) then secrets will not hit properties files, rotation will happen correctly, and you will be able to audit everything.
You can also do this using a native secret management system if you’re in a a public cloud, but Vault is, for the most part, just better.
Re: HashiCorp IPO today
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Multi-cloud is a nice idea, but not for everyone. Where i'm at it has been SQL Server for the last 12 years and now Azure for cloud services. It's highly unlikely that will change for the next 10 years. And almost equally unlikely that Terraform will be used instead of ARM templates and Bicep.
Cannot agree with this more. Single cloud has a few extraordinary benefits for slow moving organizations. Once you hang up the sign and declare "we are an xxx shop" it becomes an extraordinarily effective tool to drag unsophisticated employees and departments into the future. "Microsoft said we have to do this so we have to" overcomes a LOT of internal barriers to technical change. The biggest problems are never tech…
> "Microsoft said we have to do this so we have to" overcomes a LOT of internal barriers to technical change
“Microsoft said we have to do this so we have to” is a lot of internal barriers to technical change.
At least, that's what I see working in an public sector enterprise shop whose cloud transition started as involving a break from being a solid and conservative narrow Microsoft shop which is currently backsliding as that transition broadens and innovators at all levels (including the CTO that spearheaded it, who is departing for a CIO gig) move on or are marginalized.