IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp • Hacker News Board

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#191

Post by esseph » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 5:24 AM UTC

iwontberude wrote: post #178

throwaway2037 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

RHEL has had no significant investment to keep it from becoming irrelevant in the next five years. The datacenter and deployments of linux have changed so rapidly (mostly due to the new centralization and homogeneity of infrastructure investment) that RHELs niche is rapidly shrinking.

This is clearly someone that is not paying attention to what Red Hat is doing.

RHEL is the enterprise gold standard.

Fedora is a lot of the pipeline for it, which itself has become an incredible server and desktop platform.

All the work with Open shift, backstage, podman / qubelet, etc.

They're going to be fine, from my graybeard position.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#192

Post by csomar » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 5:31 AM UTC

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

This is not a terraform problem. This is your problem. Theoretically, you should be able to recreate the resource back with only a downtime or some services affected. You should centralize/separate state and have stronger protections for it.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#193

Post by DonHopkins » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 5:31 AM UTC

Years before '93-'96 when I worked at Kaleida [1], a joint venture of Apple and IBM, alongside Taligent [2] their AIM Alliance [3] sister company, I laughed at the old joke:

Q: What do you get when you cross Apple and IBM?

A: IBM.

But then the joke was on me when I finally worked for a company owned by Apple and IBM at the same time, and experienced it first hand!

I gave Lou Gerstner a DreamScape [4] demo involving an animated disembodied spinning bouncing eyeball, who commented "That's a bit too right-brained for me." I replied "Oh no, I should have used the other eyeball!"

Later when Sun was shopping itself around, there were rumors that IBM might buy it, so the joke would still apply to them, but it would have been a more dignified death than Oracle ending up lawnmowering [5] Sun, sigh.

Now that Apple's 15 times bigger than IBM, I bet the joke still applies, giving Apple a great reason NOT to merge with IBM.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kaleida_Labs

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taligent

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIM_alliance

[4] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5NytloOy7WM&t=323s

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5170246

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#194

Post by dralley » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 5:33 AM UTC

cpitman wrote: post #185

oso2k wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Every time you say rocket chat, I have to appear. FWIW, the change at Red Hat has always been hard to separate between the forces of IBM and the reality of changing leadership. In a lot of ways those are intertwined because some of the new leadership came from IBM. Whatever change there was happened relatively gradually over many years.

Paul Cormier was a very different type of CEO than Jim Whitehurst for sure. But that's not an IBM thing, he was with Red Hat for 20 years previously.

I agree with you FWIW. The company also basically doubled in size from 2019 to 2023. It's very hard to grow like that and experience zero changes. And COVID happened shortly after so that also throws a wrench into the comparisons.

The point is, it's hard to point to any particular decisions or changes I disliked and say "IBM did that"

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#195

Post by jonathanoliver » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 5:45 AM UTC

schmichael wrote: post #110

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…

We use Nomad where I work and we LOVE it. Previous to Nomad we used K8s for several years which, at that point, allowed us to become cloud agnostic. With the move to Nomad about 3+ years ago, we were able to transition away from cloud and back to leased, bare metal machines. During our time with K8s, it didn't have a good bare-metal strategy with their ingress mechanism. In contrast, as we investigated Nomad, it was easy to deploy on pure metal without a hypervisor. The result of our migration to Nomad was having so many capable and far-less-expensive hosting options. Lastly, as part of our Nomad control plane, we also adopted Vault and Consul with great success.

I know there are horror stories around this acquisition and lots of predictions about what will happen, but only time will tell. On a minimum, it has been a delight to use the Hashicorp software stack along with the approach they brought to our engineering workflow (remember Vagrant?). These innovations and approaches aren't going away.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#196

Post by nayuki » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 5:53 AM UTC

thisisnotauser wrote: post #137

schmichael wrote: post #110

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'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,…

> Every IBM product I've ever used is universally reviled by every person I've met who also had to use it

During my time at IBM and at other companies a decade ago, I can name examples of this:

* Lotus Notes instead of Microsoft Office.

* Lotus Sametime Connect instead of... well Microsoft's instant messengers suck (MSN, Lync, Skype, Teams)... maybe Slack is one of the few tolerable ones?

* Rational Team Concert instead of Git or even Subversion.

* Rational ClearCase instead of Git ( https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1074580/clearcase-advant... ).

* Using a green-screen terminal emulator on a Windows PC to connect to a mainframe to fill out weekly timesheets for payroll, instead of a web app or something.

I'll concede that I like the Eclipse IDE a lot for Java, which was originally developed at IBM. I don't think the IDE is good for other programming languages or non-programming things like team communication and task management.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#197

Post by throwaway2037 » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 5:54 AM UTC

iwontberude wrote: post #178

throwaway2037 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

RHEL has had no significant investment to keep it from becoming irrelevant in the next five years. The datacenter and deployments of linux have changed so rapidly (mostly due to the new centralization and homogeneity of infrastructure investment) that RHELs niche is rapidly shrinking.

If RHEL is becoming irrelevant, what distro will replace it for enterprise users?

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#198

Post by glenngillen » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 5:56 AM UTC

NetOpWibby wrote: post #67

hashicorporal wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really wanted to work at HashiCorp in 2017/2018 and did five interviews in one day only to get ghosted[1]. That experience soured me on HC and its tools but I still admired them from afar. End of an era. --- [1]: https://blog.webb.page/2018-01-11-why-the-job-search-sucks.t...

I used to work at HashiCorp, and was a hiring manager. I know there's reasons why candidates might get given vague answers on why we're not proceeding, but I'd have been horrified to learn someone we interviewed got ghosted. Someone who was so far into the process that they did five interviews?! Inexcusable.

I'm so sorry that happened to you :( I hope you found somewhere else that filled you with excitement.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#199

Post by NetOpWibby » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 6:05 AM UTC

glenngillen wrote: post #198

NetOpWibby wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really wanted to work at HashiCorp in 2017/2018 and did five interviews in one day only to get ghosted[1]. That experience soured me on HC and its tools but I still admired them from afar. End of an era. --- [1]: https://blog.webb.page/2018-01-11-why-the-job-search-sucks.t...

I used to work at HashiCorp, and was a hiring manager. I know there's reasons why candidates might get given vague answers on why we're not proceeding, but I'd have been horrified to learn someone we interviewed got ghosted. Someone who was so far into the process that they did five interviews?! Inexcusable. I'm so sorry that happened to you :( I hope you found somewhere else that filled you with excitement.

Thank you.

Personal projects fill the void when $DAYJOB is lacking.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#200

Post by anonfordays » Fri, Feb 28, 2025, 6:05 AM UTC

dpkirchner wrote: post #190

anonfordays wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"What happens if I turn a table saw on and start breakdancing on it?" Of course you're going to hurt yourself. If you didn't put lifecycle blocks on your production resources, you weren't organizationally mature enough to be using Terraform in production. Take an associate Terraform course, this specific topic is covered in it.

I'm not familiar with every lifecycle argument but I don't know of any that prevent resources being destroyed if they are removed from the tf file (what the parent was talking about). prevent_destroy, per docs, only applies as long as the resource is defined. I think the only way to avoid accidentally destroying a resource is to refer to it somewhere else, like in a depends_on array. At least that would block the pla…

>I don't know of any that prevent resources being destroyed if they are removed from the tf file (what the parent was talking about).

Azure Locks (which you can also manage with Terraform), Open Policy Agent, Sentinel rules, etc. will prevent a destroy even if you remove the definition from your Terraform codebase. Again, if you're not operationally mature enough, the problem isn't the tool, it's you.