Earlier quoted context omitted.
That closeness allowed CentOS to be a drop-in replacement for RHEL for thousands of installations and exotic hardware combinations. Unfortunately, we don't have this capability anymore. Rocky bears most of that load now.
Despite being a debian/ubuntu guy, I usually used CentOS for production deployments because it would be easy and seamless to upgrade to RHEL when I hit the big leagues. Not anymore. I just use the latest ubuntu LTS and call it a day. IBM/RedHat was soo predictably short sighted on this.
IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp
381–390 of 407 posts
Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp
#382I 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…
I used it literally this year to create a test double of the NUC that runs my home automation stack. I also used Packer to configure Flatcar and create the qcow2 that Vagrant consumes.
Vagrant is still the best tool for creating a general purpose VM on your machine. It got kind-of forgotten in the containers and Kubernetes hype, but it still gets the job done. Packer is also the best tool for creating VM images that got buried for the same reasons.
The datacenter is coming back, though. IBM would be smart to invest in these tools as loss leaders to TFE and Vault and monetize the providers, IMO.
Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp
#383As it happened with the other startups that were acquired by IBM, this too shall pass through the digestion system of the dinosaur and ejected out as a dump. Hashicorp products are showing the signs of a legacy thing already. IBM is the nursing home for these sort of aging stuff. I'm a heavy user of Terraform and Vault products. Both do not belong to this era. Also worked for a startup acquired and dumped by IBM.
What, in this era, replaces provisioning cloudy stuff that doesn't require heaps of YAML or a bootstrap Kubernetes cluster for operators to run within?
Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp
#384Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Why hire people in the first place if you aren't profitable? Seems pretty irresponsible to me. Or have the rules changed?
Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp
#385Earlier quoted context omitted.
What are the modern equivalents? For Terraform I'd imagine it's Pulumi or OpenTofu but what is it for Vault? Last I checked OpenBao didn't seem to have much juice but it's been a minute since I did so. Or are there unrelated projects in this space that are on the same trajectory as Hashicorp was a decade ago?
Crossplane for TF. Secrets whatever your cloud provider has (Google secrets manager etc).
Crossplane is excellent but you need to understand CRDs and kubectl at what I'd consider n intermediate level to really grok it whereas Terraform's CLI is almost fool-proof.
Relying on cloud key vaults is expensive and locks you in. Vault and Consul can run anywhere, even in your toaster. They also support those same KMS. Also, dead easy TUI and GUI with Vault Enterprise
Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any sufficiently large configuration language eventually becomes Turing complete (or close to it). See HCL, GitHub actions, kubernetes.
Kubernetes is not like the others in that list because it remains a declaration of intended state . There are for sure no "if", "loop", or even variables in the .yaml files. You may be thinking of the damn near infinite templating languages that generate said yaml, or even Kustomize that is JSONPatch-as-a-Service. GHA is not like the others because it is an imperative scripting language in yaml, not a "configuration…
Mutation via hook?
Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 manageme…
The various clients I’ve worked for who used TF would have lapped this up. RUM (or the equally opaque “call us” - we won’t answer! - enterprise pricing that proceeded it) not so much.
Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
so? That just means that it is not necessarily compatible with the current version of rhel deployed on our servers
It's the same major version, so it's extremely compatible. Plus if you run into something that doesn't work the same, you just discovered what's going to break for your workload on your RHEL system when the next minor version is released.
Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp
#389Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your team should be reviewing Terraform plans before merging any infra changes. I find this to be a very strange criticism and is probably indicative of a poor workflow or CI/CD system if anything.
It's a design flaw. It should be nearly impossible to delete data accidentally. And it should be possible to roll back state in IIAC. No serious organization with any scale is going to have the only thing standing between them and a production database deletion being two over tired engineers rubber stamping each other's code changes. Bad config pushes to prod do happen and they can cause outages like the 2024 Cloudst…
Still not envisioning what your expected solution would look like.
You check the plan, you asses the actions it will take and you either abandon the plan or apply it. You can't roll back destructive changes in cloud environments that's not possible today for obvious reasons.
What IaC does provide is a mechanism to quickly rebuild if you do accidentally wipe out resources.
I've worked in environments were our entire fleet was wiped out by AWS (thousands of VMs) and we were able to rebuild in hours because of IaC.
> No serious organization with any scale is going to have the only thing standing between them and a production database deletion being two over tired engineers rubber stamping each other's code changes.
Most "serious organizations" either have policy as code (Sentinel) or are running Terraform with credentials/roles that have reduced capabilities.
> Bad config pushes to prod do happen and they can cause outages like the 2024 Cloudstrike outage. You don't want a tool that takes a minor (but significant) error and turns it into a catastrophic one because of poorly thought out semantics. It's better to just start with a tool that requires at least two engineers to explicitly sign off on deletion.
This is a criticism of all software/infrastructure deployments with no guardrails. There's nothing stopping you from having two engineers sign off on a TF plan. You can absolutely build that system on top of whatever pipeline you are running.
* Funny you mention databases because that's one of the few AWS resources that can be guarded in TF directly - https://registry.terraform.io/providers/hashicorp/aws/latest...
Re: IBM completes acquisition of HashiCorp
#390Earlier 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,…
> 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…