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HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

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Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#51

Post by nine_k »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #46

Open source rules the world. A lot of people use HashiCorp's OSS products; not a lot pay for them. I certainly haven't and I don't think I've ever met a paying Hashicorp customer even though I know lots of people that use their products. They are a consulting business ultimately. And like many such companies they thrive on complexity. They are doomed to become part of the problem they are trying to solve. If they suc…

Anybody can go and install Linux on almost anything that computes. How do Red Hat, Canonical, Suse even exist?

I'd say two parts are key: support (you can see it as a kind of technology insurance) and customized, tailor-made solutions in more demanding cases.

Those who use Hashicorp products for free mostly would never pay for them. But some of those people will work in larger companies which would pay, and it is important for Hashicorp (Microsoft, Google, etc) that those people, as technical experts, would suggest buying the tools they know and love.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#52

Post by raffraffraff »

yomkippur wrote: post #25
bayareabadboy wrote: post #11

I use terraform everyday, and I’m not exactly Warren Buffet but it is kinda funny juxtaposing this article with the current stock price and trajectory since IPO.

I never use terraform. I use web console first and then if something really needs to be automated I use bash script to string together aws cli. If anything gets more complex than that I do not automate it, instead I use CDK to essentially write infrastructure just like any code. There is a lot of time wasted in learning a DSL and than wrestling with the limits of what it can do. For most infrastructure scaffolding yo…

Perhaps it doesn't apply to your situation, but that happens if you need to build 5 more copies of your current setup? The CDK stuff would be fine as long as your code is DRY, but all that clicking on the console... Also, can other people understand and extend your infrastructure? (Honest questions)

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#53

Post by raffraffraff »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #46

Open source rules the world. A lot of people use HashiCorp's OSS products; not a lot pay for them. I certainly haven't and I don't think I've ever met a paying Hashicorp customer even though I know lots of people that use their products. They are a consulting business ultimately. And like many such companies they thrive on complexity. They are doomed to become part of the problem they are trying to solve. If they suc…

Hashicorp isn't just a small fish in the pond, it's a bunch of smaller fish in different ponds. I use Terraform to deploy EKS and a bunch of other AWS stuff. I have used Vault as part of a secret management strategy. I've only used Nomad as a toy. I ditched Vagrant after docker came along.

Hashicorp isn't one cohesive product, it's a bunch of parts that can work together. "But you may need an adult to help you with the scissors and glue".

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#54

Post by ralph84 »

nine_k wrote: post #51
jillesvangurp wrote: post #46

Open source rules the world. A lot of people use HashiCorp's OSS products; not a lot pay for them. I certainly haven't and I don't think I've ever met a paying Hashicorp customer even though I know lots of people that use their products. They are a consulting business ultimately. And like many such companies they thrive on complexity. They are doomed to become part of the problem they are trying to solve. If they suc…

Anybody can go and install Linux on almost anything that computes. How do Red Hat, Canonical, Suse even exist? I'd say two parts are key: support (you can see it as a kind of technology insurance) and customized, tailor-made solutions in more demanding cases. Those who use Hashicorp products for free mostly would never pay for them. But some of those people will work in larger companies which would pay, and it is imp…

Red Hat is the exception that proves the rule. Canonical and Suse haven't been huge successes from a financial perspective. They've survived mostly by investors hoping they'd turn into the next Red Hat but they haven't.

Certainly Amazon, Microsoft, and Google have generated much more revenue selling cloud services based on Linux than even Red Hat ever did selling Linux support.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#55

Post by systemvoltage »

nine_k wrote: post #51
jillesvangurp wrote: post #46

Open source rules the world. A lot of people use HashiCorp's OSS products; not a lot pay for them. I certainly haven't and I don't think I've ever met a paying Hashicorp customer even though I know lots of people that use their products. They are a consulting business ultimately. And like many such companies they thrive on complexity. They are doomed to become part of the problem they are trying to solve. If they suc…

Anybody can go and install Linux on almost anything that computes. How do Red Hat, Canonical, Suse even exist? I'd say two parts are key: support (you can see it as a kind of technology insurance) and customized, tailor-made solutions in more demanding cases. Those who use Hashicorp products for free mostly would never pay for them. But some of those people will work in larger companies which would pay, and it is imp…

Don't forget Gitlab.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#56

Post by KronisLV »

I can't comment on all the marketing aspects, but the idea of creating products to handle all of the concerns of application development and deployment seems like a really good one: everything from provisioning infrastructure with Terraform, to running containers with a combination of Nomad and possibly Consul. In my eyes, that's enough to validate HCL as a viable language, versus it just being a weird DSL for a single product instead.

Also, the other day someone suggested that Nomad doesn't have a future when compared to Kubernetes, though it would seem that there are plenty of orgs also investing in HashiCorp's offering and quite possibly benefiting from the somewhat simpler architecture.

That said, I can't help but to wonder why the cloud vendors don't embrace Nomad as well - after all, if many of them can offer managed Kubernetes, then surely managed Nomad would be both cheaper and easier to implement. Most of those platforms already offer a variety of databases (e.g. MySQL/MariaDB and PostgreSQL), so it's not like the idea could be dismissed on the grounds of duplicated effort alone.

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#57

Post by sshine »

hericium wrote: post #45

Vault is great. But if I were to start learning Terraform now, I'd probably ditch it in favor of Pulumi. Terraform was supposed to make writing DRY easy. It's often more reasonable to copy-paste parts of configuration than to try make it DRY. HashiCorp seems to have the approach of "if something can be hacked around, even in a very convoluted way, we can ignore any feature requests for that thing to be doable in a no…

I find that HCL (Terraform's declarative resource specification format) is an excellent target for a compiler for a DRY description of my resources. :-D

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#58

Post by yomkippur »

raffraffraff wrote: post #52
yomkippur wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never use terraform. I use web console first and then if something really needs to be automated I use bash script to string together aws cli. If anything gets more complex than that I do not automate it, instead I use CDK to essentially write infrastructure just like any code. There is a lot of time wasted in learning a DSL and than wrestling with the limits of what it can do. For most infrastructure scaffolding yo…

Perhaps it doesn't apply to your situation, but that happens if you need to build 5 more copies of your current setup? The CDK stuff would be fine as long as your code is DRY, but all that clicking on the console... Also, can other people understand and extend your infrastructure? (Honest questions)

you are describing different scenarios here with different scope and i did not say to use web console only

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#59

Post by yomkippur »

kfrzcode wrote: post #39
yomkippur wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never use terraform. I use web console first and then if something really needs to be automated I use bash script to string together aws cli. If anything gets more complex than that I do not automate it, instead I use CDK to essentially write infrastructure just like any code. There is a lot of time wasted in learning a DSL and than wrestling with the limits of what it can do. For most infrastructure scaffolding yo…

Enjoy your zealotry!

not a very useful comment. if you got any rebuttal please fell free to share but the second half of what i wrote probably effects your future if you are in YC or a VC.

enjoy the ever costly capital as rates go to the moon!

Re: HashiCorp’s multi-product strategy

#60

Post by yomkippur »

swyx wrote: post #42

why is this absolute dreck on HN? nothing in this piece gives any indication that the authors have any idea what Hashi even does . the extent of analysis is "hurr durr cloud computing is big" and then a long nondescript "Open Source is Key to Product-Led Growth" buzzword bingo that reads like a noob discovering how bottom up open source works for the first time i need a downvote button at the post level, i want a ref…

think a lot of saas/developer tools/open source in corporate clothing are manipulating opinions, flagging, censoring criticisms. you can buy HN votes/aged accounts like Reddit.

noticed this especially when a YC company is in the submission. its funny because all they are doing is selling to the same buyers (many who are also YC companies) creating a sorta ponzi scheme where you constantly have a supply of "IPO ready" to take advnatage of the bubble which is now bursting and you have increased astroturfing

HN used to be above this. I feel increasingly that many submissions are just purely marketing hidden under a FREE sign.

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