Live data from Hacker News

IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

newsroom.ibm.com

241–250 of 407 posts

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#241
post #187

I was really hoping this wouldn't happen given one org (IBM) effectively controls both Terraform and Ansible. Salt and Puppet both don't seem in a great place. System Initiative is just AWS still, yeah? Welp.

OpenTofu is doing just fine ! Give it a whirl.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#243
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 inst…

The green screens tend to be much quicker and more responsive than the web frontends that are developed to replace them. I've seen a lot of failed projects for data entry apps because the experienced workers tend to prefer the terminals over the web apps. Usually the requirement for the new frontend is driven by management rather than the workers. Which is understandable to me as a programmer. If it's a task that I'm…

We had a tower of bable collapse, when we switched to web UI. We gained a million things and lost a million things. There was an era from around 1985 to early 2000s, where a large majority of applications had a (somewhat) consistent UI, based partially around MS-Windows, partially around some IBM 'common ui' design guide principles. The hall-marks of it was - keyboard navigation was possible - mostly consistent keyboard nav - common limited set of UI controls with consistent behaviour - for serious applications, there was some actual thought related to how the user was supposed to navigate through the system during operation (efficiency)

Post-web and post 9/11, where web browser UI has infested everything, we are now in a cambryan explosion of crayon-eating UI design.

It seems our priorities have been confused by important things like 'Hi George. I just noticed, that for the admin panels in our app, the background colours of various controls get the wrong shade of '#DEADBF' when loading on the newest version of Safari, can you figure out why that happens?'. 'Oh, and the new framework for making smushed shadows on drop-downs seems to have increased our app's startup time on page transitions from 3.7 seconds to 9.2 seconds, is there any way we can alleviate that, maybe by installing some more middleware and a new js framework npm module? I heard vite should be really good, if you can get rid of those parts where we rely on webpack?'

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#244
post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 inst…

The green screens tend to be much quicker and more responsive than the web frontends that are developed to replace them. I've seen a lot of failed projects for data entry apps because the experienced workers tend to prefer the terminals over the web apps. Usually the requirement for the new frontend is driven by management rather than the workers. Which is understandable to me as a programmer. If it's a task that I'm…

>The green screens tend to be much quicker and more responsive than the web frontends that are developed to replace them.

Agree! Back in 2005, I was involved in a project to build a web front end as a replacement for the 'green screen' IBM terminal UI connecting to AS400 (IIRC). All users hated the web frontend with passion, and to this day, I do not see web tech that could compete in terms of data entry speed, responsiveness, and productivity. I still think about this a lot when building stuff these days. I'm hoping one day I'll find an excuse to try textualize.io or something like this for the next project :)

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The green screens tend to be much quicker and more responsive than the web frontends that are developed to replace them. I've seen a lot of failed projects for data entry apps because the experienced workers tend to prefer the terminals over the web apps. Usually the requirement for the new frontend is driven by management rather than the workers. Which is understandable to me as a programmer. If it's a task that I'm…

I second the TUI argument here. Back in ... maybe 2005 or what, in our ~60 people family business, I had the pleasure to watch an accountant use our bespoke payroll system. That was a DOS-based app, running on an old Pentium 1 system. She was absolutely flying through the TUI. F2, type some numbers, Enter, F5 and so on and so on, at an absolutely blistering speed. Data entry took single-digit seconds. When that was c…

Things have changed back though - the CLI is hot again at-least amongst developers.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#246

Hashicorp's stuff always struck me as pretty hacky with awkward design decisions. 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. Then they did the license change, which didn't reflect well on them. Now it's being sold to IBM, which is essentially a consulting company trying to pivot to mostly undiff…

My hot take is just that Vault isn't a good solution, and the permissions model is wholly inadequate.

Except for not "feeling" secure, the only thing everyone wants is a Windows AD file share with ACLs.

Just no one realises this: all the Vault on disk encryption and unsealing stuff is irrelevant - it's solving a problem handled at an entirely different level.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#247
post #5

Investors at IPO lost quite a bit of money...

Yeap we did. I wrote it off around the time of the licence change, just after they decided to ditch the TF Team plan in favour of the utterly ridiculous “Resources Under Management” billing model. I knew the company had lost the plot at that point.

I actually prefer the RUM model.

The previous "per apply" based model penalized early stage companies when your infrastructure is rapidly evolving, and discouraged splitting state into smaller workspaces/making smaller iterative changes.

Charging by RUM more closely aligns the pricing to the scale/complexity of the infrastructure being managed which makes more sense to me.

That said it has tempted me to move management of more resources into kubernetes (via cross plane/config connector)

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The green screens tend to be much quicker and more responsive than the web frontends that are developed to replace them. I've seen a lot of failed projects for data entry apps because the experienced workers tend to prefer the terminals over the web apps. Usually the requirement for the new frontend is driven by management rather than the workers. Which is understandable to me as a programmer. If it's a task that I'm…

I second the TUI argument here. Back in ... maybe 2005 or what, in our ~60 people family business, I had the pleasure to watch an accountant use our bespoke payroll system. That was a DOS-based app, running on an old Pentium 1 system. She was absolutely flying through the TUI. F2, type some numbers, Enter, F5 and so on and so on, at an absolutely blistering speed. Data entry took single-digit seconds. When that was c…

Not just accountants. I remember watching fully “non-technical” insurance admin / customer service people play the green screen keyboard like they were concert pianists. People can cope with a lot when they have to.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#249
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropping CentOS was a terrible decision. I’m not sure if that happened before or after the acquisition though.

Centos stream still exists and it is in fact the actual upstream of rhel.

But for all practical purposes, that is dropping CentOS. They completely changed the identity of the product, so the fact it has the same branding isn't going to placate anyone.

Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp

#250
post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropping CentOS was a terrible decision. I’m not sure if that happened before or after the acquisition though.

Centos stream still exists and it is in fact the actual upstream of rhel.

so? That just means that it is not necessarily compatible with the current version of rhel deployed on our servers
Post reply on HN