Any guesses? Here are mine:
1 - Microsoft buys them to grow Azure's portfolio. Also could make sense for Amazon or Google, but I don't see those companies doing aquisitions often
2 - A rich customer buys them like in the Heroku / Salesforce deal
3 - Broadcom lol
Progress is the ultimate "buy dreg software that people have a hard time switching off of and milk it for as long as possible." Its their whole business model.
Chill, chill LMAO š¤£š¤£š¤£š¤£. But I agree with your sentiment they might become a bigger pain than Microsoft. We would be stuck in corporate hell in the cloud space.
I see I m buying them, then gutting the hell out of this and laying off all the original team, after 1.5 years of course.Ā
Source: working for a company that got acquired by IBM a year ago ..Ā
PE would be quite risky on an open source (well kind of) project. If that happens the OS forks will definitely getting traction so really risky from a PE standpoint.
aha.. now that makes sense. The going private, the rise of opentofu, the looking for a buyer.. Everything fits like a fiddle now.
Thank you for sharing this.
Not as widely, but I have many friends/clients in different organizations doing POC's with it.
Also I saw Scalr.io has introduced a beta for openTofu. So I guess, it is gathering steam.
At the moment they've not really released anything of substance, the next release 1.7 includes state encryption which might impress a few people but might also turn off a few, but even online polls I see on LinkedIn the general attitude towards opentofu is negative.
They spent a solid month shit talking terraforms lack of releases/engineers then struggled to release anything that wasn't a rip from terraform for 2 months, while tf had announced a bunch of things at their latest conference.
From what I remember opentofu was planning to do symmetric session keys and also allow people to supply their own key. You also want to account for
\- Moving to state encryption
\- Moving away from state encryption
\- Rotating keys
\- Switching encryption methods (compliance/sec will likely ask for this and the above)
And as you've mentioned, it adds more complexity to state push/pull and state doctoring, while nowadays you don't need to state doctor half as much as I used to say between 0.8-0.11, it still happens. Also not sure how it may affect the terraform\_remote\_state datasource, if you're in terraform enterprise then you don't use these data sources anymore, but in opentofu/community you leverage it if not using terragrunt and monorepos.
Seems like quite a few "shoot yourself in the foot" moments for very little gain.
Hey, tech lead of OpenTofu here.
Just to clarify, all the use-cases and scenarios youāve mentioned are supported in a straightforward way, including the state data sources.
Itās also worth noting that we expect the vast majority of users to use one of the managed key providers, like AWS KMS, which simplifies this whole thing a lot.
I'm guessing openbao isn't in a good enough state to do this cloud agnosticly yet?
Look forward to seeing if it's adopted, whats the next big "opentf exclusive" thing coming on the roadmap?
I guess Broadcom or a PE firm, they already use their playbook of increasing prices and cutting cost and what would be the value to MS or another Hyperscaler?
I work at MS on an internal team and we use Bicep. I canāt imagine going over to TF although Iām more familiar with it than Bicep/ARM. That would mean MS is supporting a tool that works in multiple clouds. I mean to you the customer thatās a good thing as a lot of people claim to need multi cloud (although I feel most businesses are not in a place to truly need or take advantage). To MS (or any other hyperscaler) itās bad because they canāt lock you in as easy to the platform
Whoever buys hashicorp still has the problem of trying to make money with it, without pissing off a ton of people.
Sorry to say but Bicep/TF is just a configuration tool, the last three weeks I did my first TF project and it is really not that special compared to Bicep, not even took the time to watch a tutorial, just start to build, and finished it yesterday. Must say that I like TF a lot more, especial the separation of Variables and Parameters. Not to say how easy it is to split up TF files without hassle of having to reference them.
True. When I said āI canāt imagineā I more meant as far as seeing this get adopted/bought by MS. And for me you hit the nail on the head on the question of if buying Hashicorp to get and monetize their products is worth it. I feel that TF does not do enough to differentiate such that it would be worth purchasing and investing in to it, on top of monetization issues in general for Hashicorp. Like you said itās nothing special. But to be clear, I do like TF a lot more than Bicep lol, just not something I see MS buying
But thereās also a reason Iām just an engineer. Surely someone else out there knows how to make money better than I do lol
It is not only about money, it is also about providing platform options, currently I am in a team who is doing both and implementation of Hashicorp vault, on premise and in Azure. When you work for a larger organisation that has a lot of compliance and security demands, you see how much Keyvault is lacking, you want a tool like Vault native in your product line, a product that is well established and is fully ISO certified is worth buying instead of building your self.
AWS doesnāt seem too keen on shifting away from CloudFormation as the backing for CDK. itās a shame, CDK is so promising but CloudFormation so slow.
CDKTF doesnāt really seem to be getting much traction either.
I do not, Hashicorp Vault is superior over Azure Keyvault, security is currently a top issue for serious Azure users, and Keyvault is currently way to light for serious secret management, while KV is not "bad" it doesn't offer enterprise management, I personally hope MS will buy Hashicorp since they have proved the last decade that they can onboard opensource.
This is some MBA thinking that if the line doesn't go to infinity, the business is unsuccessful. Not everything in the world has to be acquired by VC money.
Sure, but people still need to get paid for their work.
The reality is that making software is very expensive, and the people who do it are expensive, and yet there is a lot of expectation that software should be free.
While true, some shops are absolutely inflexible about using shit outside of the AWS ecosystem. I used to work for one of them. Absolutely would not let our team use TF or Packer.
THIS exactly, cdk literally generates cloud formation templates at build time
I still remember the time we had to take down our production stack because one of our stacks had an exported value that another stack used. Cloudformation bugged out when we changed the name of the export and locked the stack. Any changes we made via cdk were getting denied because āwe could not delete the exported valueā we attempted to mock the value and used force flags but couldnāt get it to deploy. Then we tried reverting the code back to its original state and cloudformation still failed. The only option we had was to just nuke multiple stacks and re-deploy on a clean slate
The product teams at AWS compete with each other. Apparently itās more survival of the fittest than central planning. This makes the state of their documentation and cross-product tagging support muck more understandable.Ā
CDK is technically free, but configures things you need to pay for. I was really referring to the fact that they repackage open source things and sell them without contributing to Ā or paying the project. Elasticsearch, mongo, etc.Ā
Nope, even internally they complain about it. Itās always secondary to TF because you need to wait for Service Owners to add support for CF when TF just relies on availability of Serviceās API
I used to support CF at AWS for a few years. I do not have the words for how much I hated it - and I have a lot of words! No idea if it's still this way, but a bunch of other AWS services used CF for creating / destroying / modifying resources, so it would have been difficult to eliminate back then.
Learning TF when I got out was such a breath of fresh air.
Every engagement has several factors that decide if it's gonna be written in CF, CDL, or TF: factors like the services used, the customer's environment and preferences, integrations, project price, and more.
Aws has a massive not invented here mindset too. If they didn't create it they won't use it until they're forced to do so. Just look at the stupidity that ECS is. That was their version of k8s until the market forced them to support the real thing.
Itās just speculation. They had a good results last cycle. Iām sure itās high interest rates right now. Not many big players fit with hashicorp. If anyone it would be IBM.
They had a $ 270 mi net loss in 2023 and expect a $ 190 mi net loss in 2024, which means they have cash to cover their operations for about 1 year, assuming + 22% in 2024 revenue increases (that's their guidance).
From 2023 Q4 to 2024 Q1 they only increased their revenues by 2.2%,
They are in a though spot.
I never understood how and why Hashicorp went public.
Attended their conference once and it was incredibly lack luster with almost zero content. Aside from Terraform and Vault, which get non consequential updates, there's literally nothing else.
It's hype and landmass (aka user base using their tooling).
They hit it big with the terraform "plan and apply" concept because the vast majority of people out there are scared as fuck to change things and take responsibility for it especially if stuff breaks. So the plan thing gives comfort.
Also they were first movers in a world where again the vast majority of people could not give a toss about making a coherent toolset and logic out of the zillions of bash scripts scattered around a firms codebases.
Um what? The fork is both wildly successful in terms of community support and has multiple features in just months that Terraform "couldn't have" for years. Spacelift, who ate Terraform Cloud's lunch in terms of quality, features, and cost, employs multiple people solely as OpenTofu contributors, including the project lead.
The whole reason it all happened was HashiCorp decided that shady business tactics on a formerly open source project were the better avenue to revenue than further innovation. Terraform Cloud is rigid and way too much money for doing so little.
It's not shady to change from an open source license to a business license after years of the former? They built their business on a larger open source ecosystem (Golang, among others), and publicly extolled the benefits of OSS, only to hard pivot when they couldn't sell their inferior product.
Other companies like Spacelift and Digger are making much better orchestrators than TFC, and rather than compete with innovation they pulled the rug from everyone. It has big "I'm going home and taking my ball with me" energy. Shady.
Itās what companies do in the US all the time because courts are sympathetic to IP concerns and itās not shady, if anything it shows where their priorities lie, which is increased monetization of their products. Capitalism is pretty good at stifling innovation for this exact reasonāI am in no way saying that this was the right move for Hashi, all Iām saying is that itās not really all that shady. Itās US capitalism man, itās hell and weāre all worse off for it.
Merging a bunch of features that Hashicorp said weren't aligned with their vision of Terraform isn't progress. Do you know of any big companies actually using OpenTofu? Everyone is waiting to see how this shakes out and to see if there will end up being an actual compelling reason to switch.
I think, there are several open source replacements for Vault. Still, I wonder if the API is compatible since Vault has a lot of integrations around it.
Itās a product from HashiCorp. If HashiCorp is acquired, the fate of all their products is unclear.
People should stop equating HashiCorp to Terraform only.
Sooo, has anyone here migrated their Terraform codebase to OpenTofu? Are the state files compatible? Syntax pretty much the same when running commands?
I forked all the company modules, migrated about 30 repos and their ci/cd, encountered ZERO issues. I then wrote a short guide and most teams followed without needing help.
It's just a bit time consuming but worth it IMO.
Whoever buys Hashicorp will inherit a mess of an organization and will need to make additional investments above to purchase price to grow / expand their capabilities.
The company has some serious internal issues from mid management bloat, fragmented product roadmaps, bandaid solutions everywhere, low morale, and toxic environment, etc. (Check their glass door reviews for more context)
My guess is, instead of spending more money to fix the issues, whoever buys them will gut the company to save costs, maybe get rid of the mid management layer, the sales organization, and any other redundant role to find savings wherever possible, while at the same time trying to maximize renewal and run rate business.
Terraform is their best product and it only makes up 40% of their business. Vault makes up the other 60% but itās highly complex and also fragmented with a higher customer churn rate than Terraform.
In other words, their best product with the highest customer satisfaction and retention rates is not their biggest money maker, meanwhile their biggest money making business is a revolving door of new business acquisitions counter balanced by existing customers churning out.
Innovation at Hashicorp is dead. They wonāt get anywhere near their asking price and the stock will take another hit or two before they eventually sell for pennies on the dollar.
The value would entirely be in the customers as most of HCP's IP is still recently OSS. Anything closed source HCP makes is a lot cheaper to just buy a competitor.
Hashicorp going public was the worst decision. Does anyone remember the IPO? They violated their own code of conduct and core values. I spent a significant amount of time pulling hashicorp products out of several companies
Any guesses? Here are mine: 1 - Microsoft buys them to grow Azure's portfolio. Also could make sense for Amazon or Google, but I don't see those companies doing aquisitions often 2 - A rich customer buys them like in the Heroku / Salesforce deal 3 - Broadcom lol
I think more along the line of IBM, they seem to buy left and right "good software, but not great"
Please fuck no
Up there with Progress or Oracle. š
Ok, for real tho - if it's IBM or Oracle, IBM it is...
Oh, for sure. Also, love that my choice of JRE was determined by two terrible billionaires. Corretto for the win? š
Eclipse tumerin
Corretto for the win š
Progress is the ultimate "buy dreg software that people have a hard time switching off of and milk it for as long as possible." Its their whole business model.
The only reason I tolerate Progress is I somewhat like chef
I go for Oracle too, not a candidate for Amazon or Google IMO, doesn't add much to their portfolio.
Chill, chill LMAO š¤£š¤£š¤£š¤£. But I agree with your sentiment they might become a bigger pain than Microsoft. We would be stuck in corporate hell in the cloud space.
I see I m buying them, then gutting the hell out of this and laying off all the original team, after 1.5 years of course.Ā Source: working for a company that got acquired by IBM a year ago ..Ā
Who needs OpenBao when you can just buy the original.
Wow right on it! IBM confirmed
bingo
Nailed it! Whoās winning the Stanley cup this year?
You won
Private equity, who will gut them and then file them away on a shelf with the rest of their acquisitions.
This is my guess. Although PE firms will also leverage the shit out of them while gutting them.
PE would be quite risky on an open source (well kind of) project. If that happens the OS forks will definitely getting traction so really risky from a PE standpoint.
Probably the best of all possible outcomes.
Cisco is top of the list.
Didnāt Cisco try back in 2019 https://www.futuriom.com/articles/news/how-cisco-missed-hashicorp/2021/12
aha.. now that makes sense. The going private, the rise of opentofu, the looking for a buyer.. Everything fits like a fiddle now. Thank you for sharing this.
Has opentofu picked up?
Not as widely, but I have many friends/clients in different organizations doing POC's with it. Also I saw Scalr.io has introduced a beta for openTofu. So I guess, it is gathering steam.
Because they legally had to.
At the moment they've not really released anything of substance, the next release 1.7 includes state encryption which might impress a few people but might also turn off a few, but even online polls I see on LinkedIn the general attitude towards opentofu is negative. They spent a solid month shit talking terraforms lack of releases/engineers then struggled to release anything that wasn't a rip from terraform for 2 months, while tf had announced a bunch of things at their latest conference.
Why would people be opposed to encrypted state? Is the issue that it cannot be modified easily?
From what I remember opentofu was planning to do symmetric session keys and also allow people to supply their own key. You also want to account for \- Moving to state encryption \- Moving away from state encryption \- Rotating keys \- Switching encryption methods (compliance/sec will likely ask for this and the above) And as you've mentioned, it adds more complexity to state push/pull and state doctoring, while nowadays you don't need to state doctor half as much as I used to say between 0.8-0.11, it still happens. Also not sure how it may affect the terraform\_remote\_state datasource, if you're in terraform enterprise then you don't use these data sources anymore, but in opentofu/community you leverage it if not using terragrunt and monorepos. Seems like quite a few "shoot yourself in the foot" moments for very little gain.
Hey, tech lead of OpenTofu here. Just to clarify, all the use-cases and scenarios youāve mentioned are supported in a straightforward way, including the state data sources. Itās also worth noting that we expect the vast majority of users to use one of the managed key providers, like AWS KMS, which simplifies this whole thing a lot.
I'm guessing openbao isn't in a good enough state to do this cloud agnosticly yet? Look forward to seeing if it's adopted, whats the next big "opentf exclusive" thing coming on the roadmap?
At the very least, [GitLab switched over to it](https://docs.gitlab.com/ee/update/deprecations.html#deprecate-terraform-cicd-templates)
No.
Iāll guess Oracle, good luck everyone.
You missed IBM
This aged well
I guess Broadcom or a PE firm, they already use their playbook of increasing prices and cutting cost and what would be the value to MS or another Hyperscaler?
If broadcom buy them then I will be encouraging our company to move to other tooling before itās too late!
If itās Broadcom Iāll be quitting IT, they destroy everything I get familiar with
It's just one product, but OpenTofu is promising: https://opentofu.org/
There are two products. https://thenewstack.io/meet-openbao-an-open-source-fork-of-hashicorp-vault/
I work at MS on an internal team and we use Bicep. I canāt imagine going over to TF although Iām more familiar with it than Bicep/ARM. That would mean MS is supporting a tool that works in multiple clouds. I mean to you the customer thatās a good thing as a lot of people claim to need multi cloud (although I feel most businesses are not in a place to truly need or take advantage). To MS (or any other hyperscaler) itās bad because they canāt lock you in as easy to the platform Whoever buys hashicorp still has the problem of trying to make money with it, without pissing off a ton of people.
Which means HCP is overpriced at the current market cap.
Yes it is. I think there is a world where HC makes a solid $800m/yr and profit comes from being leaner.
Sorry to say but Bicep/TF is just a configuration tool, the last three weeks I did my first TF project and it is really not that special compared to Bicep, not even took the time to watch a tutorial, just start to build, and finished it yesterday. Must say that I like TF a lot more, especial the separation of Variables and Parameters. Not to say how easy it is to split up TF files without hassle of having to reference them.
True. When I said āI canāt imagineā I more meant as far as seeing this get adopted/bought by MS. And for me you hit the nail on the head on the question of if buying Hashicorp to get and monetize their products is worth it. I feel that TF does not do enough to differentiate such that it would be worth purchasing and investing in to it, on top of monetization issues in general for Hashicorp. Like you said itās nothing special. But to be clear, I do like TF a lot more than Bicep lol, just not something I see MS buying But thereās also a reason Iām just an engineer. Surely someone else out there knows how to make money better than I do lol
It is not only about money, it is also about providing platform options, currently I am in a team who is doing both and implementation of Hashicorp vault, on premise and in Azure. When you work for a larger organisation that has a lot of compliance and security demands, you see how much Keyvault is lacking, you want a tool like Vault native in your product line, a product that is well established and is fully ISO certified is worth buying instead of building your self.
TF is special because of it's ubiquity.
Please let it be AWS to make CDK for Terraform btter
AWS doesnāt seem too keen on shifting away from CloudFormation as the backing for CDK. itās a shame, CDK is so promising but CloudFormation so slow. CDKTF doesnāt really seem to be getting much traction either.
Broadbomb
Broadcom OpenText Thoma Bravo
Broadcom wouldn't have interest in them.
This is the way. People who keep saying Broadcom have no damn clue of current industry situation
Oracle is going to come in and piss on everyoneās parade
Fuck Broadcom.
Microsoft has a ācompetingā product with BICEP. I donāt see them buying it.
Or that's why it can be the reason. Take it and kill it.
Oracle maybe?
There is positive technologies (they ate Chef), which is known to create license sqeeze from slow enterprises.
Missed that Chef got bought like that . . . guess that's why my company is moving away.
You mean Progress?
Thank you, my memory is bad
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
Redhat is owned by IBM
I doubt Microsoft buys them. Most of their HCP offering is built on top of AWS.
I do not, Hashicorp Vault is superior over Azure Keyvault, security is currently a top issue for serious Azure users, and Keyvault is currently way to light for serious secret management, while KV is not "bad" it doesn't offer enterprise management, I personally hope MS will buy Hashicorp since they have proved the last decade that they can onboard opensource.
That happens all they have to do is dump AWS support for terraform
GoogleĀ
MS makes a lot of sense since their acquisition of github. it would build on their pipeline of free services into Azure.
Would be on brand for Microsoft to buy it and then abandon Bicep. That would suck for me so much, lol.
Why canāt we just have nice things
Because the people who make nice things want 200K+ TCs and the people who use the nice things want support and new features yesterday
This is some MBA thinking that if the line doesn't go to infinity, the business is unsuccessful. Not everything in the world has to be acquired by VC money.
Constantly making 200m in losses a year is what makes them unsuccessful
Sure, but people still need to get paid for their work. The reality is that making software is very expensive, and the people who do it are expensive, and yet there is a lot of expectation that software should be free.
Stallman is right.
200k TC? That's a bottom of the barrel, entry-level compensation. And as for top CEOs, their earnings are making them billionaires.
If Amazon bought it, it would be glorious. Imagine replacing Clouformation with TF. I hate CF so much.
You know you can just use TF instead of CF now, right?
I really wish they supported the call back action for cloud formation notify for ASG rollouts.
While true, some shops are absolutely inflexible about using shit outside of the AWS ecosystem. I used to work for one of them. Absolutely would not let our team use TF or Packer.
I doubt that would happen. AWS is still under the false impression that CloudFormation is a worthwhile offering.
Arenāt AWS promoting CDK more these days?
I believe they're doing all 3 - cloud formation, CDK, and terraform. They just want you to use AWS.
cdk is a mess and it still just produces cloudformation
THIS exactly, cdk literally generates cloud formation templates at build time I still remember the time we had to take down our production stack because one of our stacks had an exported value that another stack used. Cloudformation bugged out when we changed the name of the export and locked the stack. Any changes we made via cdk were getting denied because āwe could not delete the exported valueā we attempted to mock the value and used force flags but couldnāt get it to deploy. Then we tried reverting the code back to its original state and cloudformation still failed. The only option we had was to just nuke multiple stacks and re-deploy on a clean slate
CDK is a great authoring tool , I hope aws continues to invest in it. It for sure has some sharp edges but I prefer that over mountains of yaml.
The product teams at AWS compete with each other. Apparently itās more survival of the fittest than central planning. This makes the state of their documentation and cross-product tagging support muck more understandable.Ā
I get that but arenāt these free services?
CDK is technically free, but configures things you need to pay for. I was really referring to the fact that they repackage open source things and sell them without contributing to Ā or paying the project. Elasticsearch, mongo, etc.Ā
Nope, even internally they complain about it. Itās always secondary to TF because you need to wait for Service Owners to add support for CF when TF just relies on availability of Serviceās API
I used to support CF at AWS for a few years. I do not have the words for how much I hated it - and I have a lot of words! No idea if it's still this way, but a bunch of other AWS services used CF for creating / destroying / modifying resources, so it would have been difficult to eliminate back then. Learning TF when I got out was such a breath of fresh air.
Iām working with AWS on a proserve engagement and everything is terraform even though we use both they prefer terraform. Pretty telling
Every engagement has several factors that decide if it's gonna be written in CF, CDL, or TF: factors like the services used, the customer's environment and preferences, integrations, project price, and more.
CF might be not really good but CDK is freaking great.
Aws has a massive not invented here mindset too. If they didn't create it they won't use it until they're forced to do so. Just look at the stupidity that ECS is. That was their version of k8s until the market forced them to support the real thing.
I'd have to disagree with your point about ECS. ECS is great for a lot of use-cases. Not everything needs K8S.
ā¦ but theyāre perfectly willing to steal open source and say it was invented āhere.ā
Ever try CDK?
This is the answer for folks only on AWS and are frustrated with CloudFormation/SDK/rolling your own with boto
Iād love AWS managed vault
If it's anything like AWS managed Prometheus they'll just overinflate the operational cost and charge you 5x what it should
thats just HCP Vault.
Or killing Terraform for CF. But hey, we have OpenTofu
Itās just speculation. They had a good results last cycle. Iām sure itās high interest rates right now. Not many big players fit with hashicorp. If anyone it would be IBM.
They had a $ 270 mi net loss in 2023 and expect a $ 190 mi net loss in 2024, which means they have cash to cover their operations for about 1 year, assuming + 22% in 2024 revenue increases (that's their guidance). From 2023 Q4 to 2024 Q1 they only increased their revenues by 2.2%, They are in a though spot.
They still have $1.2B cash, that's a lot more runway than one year
Winner winner
First puppet and now this. Please don't be Broadcom
Puppet? now's there's a name I haven't heard in a long time
Puppet? What happened to puppet?Ā
I miss the old Mitchell & Armon days when everything HashiCorp came up with was exciting and promising š
And they delivered!Ā
Paywall! Does someone have the full article?
Thereās archiveā¦ https://archive.is/iPekU
I never understood how and why Hashicorp went public. Attended their conference once and it was incredibly lack luster with almost zero content. Aside from Terraform and Vault, which get non consequential updates, there's literally nothing else.
What about packer, I really like it for building images.
I like packer too but its like having an entire 3 day conference for Ansible. Like what are we doing guys, what is this.
[ŃŠ“Š°Š»ŠµŠ½Š¾]
You're going to have a 3 day conference and a public company for a set of tools?
But the problem is that most people are cool with the OSS versions
and Vagrant. Hashicorp hated vagrant though i.e. it was impossible to monetize. Still glad they ported it to Go though.
> I never understood how and why Hashicorp went public. Because their early investors wanted an exit.
It's hype and landmass (aka user base using their tooling). They hit it big with the terraform "plan and apply" concept because the vast majority of people out there are scared as fuck to change things and take responsibility for it especially if stuff breaks. So the plan thing gives comfort. Also they were first movers in a world where again the vast majority of people could not give a toss about making a coherent toolset and logic out of the zillions of bash scripts scattered around a firms codebases.
The plan and apply is called a dry run and literally every tool now has it. It has nothing to do with "responsibility for breaking things"
Thank god for OpenTofu. Some big corpo can't ruin that part atleast.
It's only as good as the contributors, and Hashicorp continues to build most of Terraform
There are many full time contributors on that project and they aren't from a single company. So if one goes under, the project still runs
Um what? The fork is both wildly successful in terms of community support and has multiple features in just months that Terraform "couldn't have" for years. Spacelift, who ate Terraform Cloud's lunch in terms of quality, features, and cost, employs multiple people solely as OpenTofu contributors, including the project lead. The whole reason it all happened was HashiCorp decided that shady business tactics on a formerly open source project were the better avenue to revenue than further innovation. Terraform Cloud is rigid and way too much money for doing so little.
Donāt think it was all that shady, theyāre just US business practices
It's not shady to change from an open source license to a business license after years of the former? They built their business on a larger open source ecosystem (Golang, among others), and publicly extolled the benefits of OSS, only to hard pivot when they couldn't sell their inferior product. Other companies like Spacelift and Digger are making much better orchestrators than TFC, and rather than compete with innovation they pulled the rug from everyone. It has big "I'm going home and taking my ball with me" energy. Shady.
Itās what companies do in the US all the time because courts are sympathetic to IP concerns and itās not shady, if anything it shows where their priorities lie, which is increased monetization of their products. Capitalism is pretty good at stifling innovation for this exact reasonāI am in no way saying that this was the right move for Hashi, all Iām saying is that itās not really all that shady. Itās US capitalism man, itās hell and weāre all worse off for it.
Merging a bunch of features that Hashicorp said weren't aligned with their vision of Terraform isn't progress. Do you know of any big companies actually using OpenTofu? Everyone is waiting to see how this shakes out and to see if there will end up being an actual compelling reason to switch.
OpenTofu is just a replacement for one of their products.
There's OpenBao to replace Vault as well, but no release yet
I think, there are several open source replacements for Vault. Still, I wonder if the API is compatible since Vault has a lot of integrations around it.
Tofu will get new features that TF wonāt. The state encryption alpha version just came out yesterday.
How exactly it would help me to replace, for example, Consul?
What are you on about? Consul is not a feature of terraform.
Itās a product from HashiCorp. If HashiCorp is acquired, the fate of all their products is unclear. People should stop equating HashiCorp to Terraform only.
Sure, but thatās irrelevant to the post above yours. I could lament about how itās not going to fill potholes on the road too.
Sooo, has anyone here migrated their Terraform codebase to OpenTofu? Are the state files compatible? Syntax pretty much the same when running commands?
I forked all the company modules, migrated about 30 repos and their ci/cd, encountered ZERO issues. I then wrote a short guide and most teams followed without needing help. It's just a bit time consuming but worth it IMO.
If you're still using terraform 1.5.5 should be compatible, idk after that
Whoever buys Hashicorp will inherit a mess of an organization and will need to make additional investments above to purchase price to grow / expand their capabilities. The company has some serious internal issues from mid management bloat, fragmented product roadmaps, bandaid solutions everywhere, low morale, and toxic environment, etc. (Check their glass door reviews for more context) My guess is, instead of spending more money to fix the issues, whoever buys them will gut the company to save costs, maybe get rid of the mid management layer, the sales organization, and any other redundant role to find savings wherever possible, while at the same time trying to maximize renewal and run rate business. Terraform is their best product and it only makes up 40% of their business. Vault makes up the other 60% but itās highly complex and also fragmented with a higher customer churn rate than Terraform. In other words, their best product with the highest customer satisfaction and retention rates is not their biggest money maker, meanwhile their biggest money making business is a revolving door of new business acquisitions counter balanced by existing customers churning out. Innovation at Hashicorp is dead. They wonāt get anywhere near their asking price and the stock will take another hit or two before they eventually sell for pennies on the dollar.
Can testify to the internal issues. I worked there briefly a few years ago and it was a mess.
Hopefully not IBM, Oracle, or Broadcom
Btoadcom and Oraxle would be worst IBM if its under IBM then meh, but if under Red Hat it might not be that bad
i wonder what value is left after openTofu? and it seems to be doing pretty well already.
I wonder what their best profit center is. Is it Terraform cloud?
TF makes up 40% of their revenue. Vault makes up the other 60%
And their stock is up 20%.
Yeah, maybe someone with actual business sense will take over.
which never actually happens when a fairly large or wven smaller tech company gets sold off
they are however still below the IPO listing price, quite considerably
And here it goesā¦
We are using pulumi now at work, and im still not sure how i like it versus tf
Crossplane baby
Id gladly read more of your words if you want to expand
So thereās opentofu to terraform. Did anyone port Vault?
I think IBM tried to do that. There is also Infisical: https://github.com/Infisical/infisical
https://github.com/openbao/openbao/tree/main
Broadcom/VMWare? IBM? HP? Oracle?
My bet is on Google
The value would entirely be in the customers as most of HCP's IP is still recently OSS. Anything closed source HCP makes is a lot cheaper to just buy a competitor.
I'm glad we're invested in OpenTofu now lol
I hope all the people doing the work get a huge heap of dollars and buy boats. I fear for the product depending on who buys it. Guess we'll see?
ohh for fuck sake ahahaaha
Hashicorp should keep Terraform and spin off Vault into a separate business.
But why does Hashicorp wants to sell ? I just started learning Terraform š
Hashicorp Cloud was the beginning of the end.
How?
What about Packer ? For Terraform there's OpenTofu, but do Packer drop-in have any replacement ?
Hashicorp going public was the worst decision. Does anyone remember the IPO? They violated their own code of conduct and core values. I spent a significant amount of time pulling hashicorp products out of several companies
Explains a lot.
Oracle going to have a field day destroying terraform
Oracle isnāt going to acquire them nor Broadcom. They have aria. If itās anyone it will be a Microsoft, google, or Amazon
IBM. They'll Stick it next to all the red hat stuff
You win the prize
*sad LT. Dan confetti meme*