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IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

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Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#141

Post by hiatus »

sepositus wrote: post #86
hiatus wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However, to play devil's advocate, the number of Terraform resources is a (slightly weak) predictor for resource consumption. Every resource necessitates API calls that consume compute resources. So, if you're offering a "cloud" service that executes Terraform, it's probably a decent way to scale costs appropriately. That would make sense if you paid per API call to any of the cloud providers.

What happens when you run `terraform apply`? Arguably, a lot of things, but at its core it: - Computes a list of resources and their expected state (where computation is generally proportional to the number of resources). - Synchronizes the remote state by looking up each of these resources (where network ingress/egress is proportional to the number of resources). - Compares the expected state to the remote state (ag…

In absolute terms, I agree with you. But in practical terms I would wager it is negligible.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#142

Post by jcgrillo »

homebrewer wrote: post #24
jaennaet wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who the heck is IDC's customer base, exactly? $2,500 for that, or $7,500 for this one about – drumroll, please – feature flags! "Modern digital businesses need to be able to adapt to changing end-user demand, and since feature flags decouple release from deployment, it provides a good solution for improving software development velocity and business agility," said Jim Mercer, program vice president of IDC Software De…

Something I always respected in Americans is their talent for making money from absolutely nothing, providing zero or negative value in the process of doing so. Obviously doesn't apply to everyone, but you have more than a fair share of these people.

Only in america: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ponzi

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#143

Post by tiniestcabbage »

brudgers wrote: post #105
tiniestcabbage wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is an argument to be made that price-sensitive customers are a neglected market. Granted, marketing to them is very different - they're prone to being scooped if someone comes by willing to sell your same product to them at a loss (hi, Amazon and Walmart) - but there are a lot more of them and you're not fighting every startup on the planet for the same handful of clients. Business have made a killing in China…

+ There’s an argument against every rule of thumb. + For what it is worth, the just-one-percent-of-all-Chinese is historically a poor business strategy. + As you point out, targeting price sensitive customers puts you in competition with Walmart and Amazon. Not only that but you are competing for their worst customers. you're not fighting every startup on the planet for the same handful of clients Not having access t…

That's fair. I wasn't coming for you and I'm certainly not trying to fight you from some kind of authority - I'm definitely not a businessperson.

The only point I was trying to get across is that even "bad" customers are still customers, and that there's still a lot of money to be made meeting people's needs doing the work others don't want to do. I feel like this applies from the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder all the way to the top - that's all. Perhaps I should've made that clearer, and that's on me.

An unsolicited side note: I think the bristling to this post was because of the language you were using. Talking about the poor as if they were to be discarded made you look a bit as if you have no empathy, which might not be fair to you. I get it - business require being hard-hearted if you want to get ahead because if you don't make tough decisions, someone else will - but it probably wasn't your best look, you know?

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#144

Post by jmholla »

goodoldneon wrote: post #101
JohnMakin wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> For Terraform (at least a few years ago) a badly reviewed PR could cause catastrophic data loss because resources are deleted without requiring an explicit tombstone. There have been lifecycle rules in place for as long as I can remember to prevent stuff like this. I'm not sure this is a "problem" unique to terraform.

IIRC, the lifecycle hook only prevents destruction of the resource if it needs to be replaced (e.g. change an immutable field). If you outright delete the resource declaration in code then it’s destroyed. I may be misremembering though

I'm pretty sure you are. I've had it protect me from `terraform destroy`.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#145

Post by throwaway2037 »

hashicorporal wrote: post #46
jmclnx wrote: post #4

Sorry HashiCorp, been there and got the Tee-shirt (pink) :) Actually for me, the company I was at that IBM purchased was on the verge of folding, so in that case, IBM saved our jobs and I was there for many years.

We experienced arbitrary layoffs in 2023, followed by an ominous feeling that more layoffs were imminent. However, the announcement of a deal changed the situation. Now, we are actively hiring for numerous positions. Personally, I am not planning to stay much longer. I had hoped that our corp structure would be similar to RedHat, but it seems that they intend to fully integrate us into the IBM mothership.

Was HashiCorp ever profitable since its IPO? From here, it says no: https://stockanalysis.com/stocks/hcp/financials/

If never profitable (or terrible return on equity), why would you call the layoffs "arbitrary"? It seems pretty reasonable to me.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#146

Post by throwaway2037 »

subpixel wrote: post #103
ghaff wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Red Hat has been a very atypical approach. There has been some swapping of teams back and forth but, as far as I can tell (been out of it for a while), Red Hat is still quasi-independent. Still lots of changes (probably most notably because of a lot of growth) but strategic Red Hat areas still seem to be pretty independent.

Broadly independent but filled to the gills with folks who spent a decade or more at IBM before landing at Red Hat. While this has been true of rank and file for years, recently it’s true on the c-suite.

    > filled to the gills with folks who spent a decade or more at IBM before landing at Red Hat
Was this true before the acquisition?

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#147

Post by throwaway2037 »

glzone1 wrote: post #111
bigfatkitten wrote: post #34

One of those places (like HP, Oracle and Broadcom, and also CA back in the day) where once good companies go to die.

Redhat has really delivered for IBM and IBM seems not to have messed it up too bad. Some of this is obvious (linux and mainframes aren't a bad combo). Some of it I'm a bit surprised by (openshift revenue seems strong). Probably already basically returned purchase price in revenue and much more than purchase price in market cap. A noticeable thing is https://www.redhat.com/en Most of the these type plays the home page…

Nice. When I opened their homepage, I could not find anything obvious that shows they are owned by IBM. Literally, I had to search the HTML source code to find the sequential characters "IBM"!

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#148

Post by jcgrillo »

ghaff wrote: post #60
jcgrillo wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm clearly in the wrong field.

The analyst biz doesn't actually pay especially well--at least compared to big SV-based companies.

Yeah but I could make this shit up in like.. 15-20min/mo vs working for a living like a normal human person. I'm just imagining the sheer number of vertical feet of skiing I'm missing out on and seeing red.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#149

Post by mroche »

zzzeek wrote: post #131
spicyusername wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately IBM is going to ruin everything that was good about working for Hashicorp and eventually everything that was good about Hashicorp products. I worked for a company acquired by IBM, and we held hope like you are doing, but it was only a matter of time before the benefit cuts, layoffs, and death of the pre-existing culture. Your best bet is to quit right after the acquisition and hope they give you a big r…

Red Hatter here. none of that has happened for us at Red Hat. Other than the one round of layoffs which occurred at the time that basically every tech company everywhere was doing much larger layoffs, that was pretty much it and there's no reason to think our layoffs wouldn't have been much greater at that time if we were not under the IBM umbrella. Besides that, I dont even remember when we were acquired, absolutely…

Former Hatter here (Solution Architect Q2 '21 -> Q4 '22). Other than the discussions that took place around moving the storage/business products and teams under IBM (and the recently announcement transfer of middleware), I wouldn't have expected engineering to do that much interfacing with IBM. At most, division leadership maybe (this is just personal speculation). Finance and Sales on the other hand... quite a bit more.

We had a really fun time where the classic s-word was thrown around... "s y n e r g y". Some of the folks I got to meet across the aisle had a pretty strong pre-2010 mindset. Even around opinions of the acquisition, thinking it was just another case of SOP for the business and we'd be fully integrated Soon™.

They key thing people need to remember about the Red Hat acquisition is that it was purely for expertise and personnel. Red Hat has no (or very little) IP. It's not like IBM was snatching them up to take advantage of patents or whatnot. It's in their best interest to do as little as possible to poke the bear that is RH engineering because if there was ever a large scale exodus, IBM would be holding the worlds largest $34B sack of excrement we've seen. All of the value in the acquisition is the engineering talent and customer relationships Red Hat has, not the products themselves. The power of open source development!

It's heartening to hear that your experience in engineering has been positive (or neutral?) so far. Sales saw some massive churn because that's an area IBM did have a heavier impact in. There were some fairly ridiculous expectations set for year-over-year, completely dismissing previous results and obvious upcoming trends. Lost a lot of good reps over that...

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#150

Post by sepositus »

hiatus wrote: post #141
sepositus wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What happens when you run `terraform apply`? Arguably, a lot of things, but at its core it: - Computes a list of resources and their expected state (where computation is generally proportional to the number of resources). - Synchronizes the remote state by looking up each of these resources (where network ingress/egress is proportional to the number of resources). - Compares the expected state to the remote state (ag…

In absolute terms, I agree with you. But in practical terms I would wager it is negligible.

Yeah, I'm not putting it forward as a justifying argument (just playing devil's advocate). However, it's probably how they justify it to themselves :) What makes it extra absurd is the price they charge per resource. That's where it turns into robbery.
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