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IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

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Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#151
post #59

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…

Relatively few IDC clients are paying retail for single reports other than reprint rights. They're clients with broad employee access to events and reports in various areas. Had access for many years and, yes, having (supposedly validated) data is more or less essential for lots of presentations and other types of documents because, otherwise, your claims are viewed as pulling stuff out of you rear end.

> more or less essential for lots of presentations and other types of documents

Wait. What? This reminds me of the trope of the "wikipedia citation" in high school and college.. that move was worth at most a C+. Are you seriously saying these fucks actually seriously cite this bullshit? In this day and age where even crowdsourced wiki articles seem "credible"? What the actual fuck? I hate this shit.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#152

I joined HashiCorp in 2016 to work on Nomad and have been on the product ever since. Definitely a lot of feelings today. When I joined HashiCorp was maybe 50 people. Armon Dadgar personally onboarded us one at a time, and showed me how to use the coffee maker (remember to wash your own dishes!). There have been a lot of ups (IPO) and downs (BUSL), but the Nomad team and users have been the best I've ever gotten to wo…

I worked with a bunch of people who had worked at a startup that got bought by IBM. As the other commenters attested, they too experienced that IBM is not the kind of company that's going to turn on the investment taps. There are worse companies to get bought by, but if you've only ever worked at startups then you're not likely to enjoy what this becomes.

I spoke with a guy (too long ago) that was a "genius architect" and worked for a company that was small enough, that he got to implement his castles in the air. Knowing him, they might have been quite good, but it was one person that knew the details and made changes at the architect scale. He had a quirky way of thinking.

When IBM acquired that company, after a few weeks, this guy had a meeting with new engineering people. The very first meeting, they changed things for him. Instead of a single winding road of development, they wrote out a large spreadsheet. The rows were the distinguishable parts of his large'ish and clever architecture; the columns were assignments. They essentially dismantled his world into parts, for a team to implement. He was distraught. He didn't think like that. They did not discuss it, it was the marching orders. He quit shortly afterwards, which might have been optimal for IBM.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An easy way to get someone to admit that terraform is a hacky child’s language is to ask how to simply print out the values of variables and resources you are using in terraform easily. This basic programming language 101 functionality is not present in the language

HCL isn’t a programming language. This seems to be the main misconception about it and Terraform.

Any sufficiently large configuration language eventually becomes Turing complete (or close to it). See HCL, GitHub actions, kubernetes.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've had the incredible displeasure of having to maintain multiple massive legacy COTS systems that were once designed by promising startups and ultimately got bought by IBM. IBM turned every last one into the shittiest enterprise software trash you can imagine. Every IBM product I've ever used is universally reviled by every person I've met who also had to use it, without exaggeration in the slightest. If anything,…

How is Red Hat going after the acquisition by IBM? From my view, it is going well. The enterprise product (RHEL) is still excellent.

It's going basically fine. If you're in engineering you would never notice the difference.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#156
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…

Sure but it’s calling those service apis directly. The “hard work” is not being done by the client making those calls. Presumably.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#157
post #62

The consolidation of power and IP into just several tech companies is worrying to me. Having the misfortune of working at IBM for just a few months, IBM leadership will give it the RedHat treatment. The dinosaurs at IBM will shelve their IP, and sell it for parts. Maybe Bloodmoar will buy up the rest and squeeze whatever remaining profit from acquisition. If given the chance, just take the exit rather than trying to…

>IBM leadership will give it the RedHat treatment. The dinosaurs at IBM will shelve their IP, and sell it for parts.

As someone working at Red Hat since before the acquisition, this does not match my experience of "the Red Hat treatment" even a little bit.

I don't doubt that they've handled acquisitions badly in the past but they did a decent job leaving us alone.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#158
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An easy way to get someone to admit that terraform is a hacky child’s language is to ask how to simply print out the values of variables and resources you are using in terraform easily. This basic programming language 101 functionality is not present in the language

$terraform console >var.whatever "its value" >whatever_resource.foo.whatever_attr "its value" If you mean somehow printing things when the configuration is being applied... I think you just need to understand that it's neither a procedural language (it's declarative) nor general-purpose (it's infrastructure configuration).

This works great for toy examples and fails the moment you have 1 (one) module

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#159
post #149
post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

Red Hatter since 2016, first in Consulting, now in Sales.

Oh the “synergy” rocket chat channel we had back then…

Things have been changing, for sure. So has the industry. So have our customers. By and large, Red Hatters on the ground have fought hard to preserve the culture. I have many friends across Red Hat, many that transitioned to IBM (Storage, some Middleware). Folks still love being a part of Red Hat.

On the topic of ridiculous expectations…there’s some. But Red Hatters generally figure out how to do ridiculous things like run the internet on open source software.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#160
So, what is the practical TL;DR for everyone who isn't neither an employee nor investor? Hashicorp kinda made a lot of significant stuff, but that stuff is mostly FOSS and the commercial product is very niche. I am kinda surprised IBM even bought it, because it isn't very clear to me, how commercializeable this stuff is. So what does it mean? Will IBM most likely kill some FOSS products? Is this even possible? Were, say, terraform or nomad developed mostly by internal devs, or is there a solid enough community already to keep up with development or simply fork the tool if things go south?
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