HashiCorp unveils 'Terraform 2.0' while tiptoeing around Big Blue elephant in the room

HashiCorp's annual HashiConf shindig wrapped up in Boston with a Big Blue elephant in the room and a hissed instruction: "Don't mention IBM!" That the conference was in the unspoken shadow of the impending IBM acquisition was a shame since the company unveiled some useful, if not earth-shattering, updates to its product line, …

[Anonymous Coward]

Boring but true answer - the lawyers will have insisted the didn't talk about it.

I previously got acquired by IBM and was at a similar dead duck Red Hat event before the deal closed as an IBM speaker.... There will have been N layers of legal review of every speaker for that event - IBM have had previous issues for asserting undue control before the deal closed and so any event pre-close is micro-managed within an inch of its life. Trust me, the speakers all knew it was the elephant in the room, some of them may have even suggested addressing in, and gotten a legal going over they won't forget!

[Pascal Monett]

Oh, they're being bought by IBM ?

Goodbye, HashiCorp. It was nice knowing you.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oh, they're being bought by IBM ?

IBM announced intention to acquire Red Hat in 2018-10 and made it on 2019-07. After 5/6 years Red Hat is still a independently operated, growing and healthy. Could be the same for Hashi!

[Drakon]

Re: Oh, they're being bought by IBM ?

We’ll ignore their blatant violation of the GPL

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oh, they're being bought by IBM ?

Who violated GPL? Why, if so, is not on the court?

[Gene Cash]

Re: Oh, they're being bought by IBM ?

> After 5/6 years Red Hat is still a independently operated, growing and healthy.

You broke my sarcasm meter. It's over 9000!

[Korev]

Re: Oh, they're being bought by IBM ?

Mine only goes up to 11

[CowHorseFrog]

Re: Oh, they're being bought by IBM ?

Are you sure ?

Everything that made RH interesting is basically dying... They were quite big at open source in the days, today they are boring, most of their OSS is dying or closing and they are just becoming a bunch of suits who bullshit and make cult presentations (look at the photo of the ceo).

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oh, they're being bought by IBM ?

Krishna noted that this quarter marks five years since IBM announced its intention to buy Red Hat, and since then the open source shop "has grown to approximately $6.5 billion, doubling in size and delivering a mid-teens CAGR. OpenShift scaled from about $100 million in ARR to $1.3 billion, expanding more than 10x."

Not bad for a company that is supposedly killed by IBM.

[collinsl]

Re: Oh, they're being bought by IBM ?

"Just you wait, It'll be stone dead in a minute"

"I don't want to go on the cart! I feel happy! I feel happy!"

[Robert Halloran]

Re: Oh, they're being bought by IBM ?

Actually wouldn't mind seeing some more official tie-ins between Terraform & Ansible post-merger

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Oh, they're being bought by IBM ?

"Actually wouldn't mind seeing some more official tie-ins between Terraform & Ansible post-merger"

I thought there were some monopoly concerns (potentially from regulators) relating to IBM owning both Terraform and Ansible and so cornering a large part of the "configuration management" related market.

[Anonymous Coward]

The Vault / OpenBao situation is interesting as IBM was apparently one of the prime movers behind the OpenBao fork:

"...IBM recently led the incubation of a different Linux Foundation project called OpenBAO which was a fork of HashiCorp's Vault, in an apparent move to signal displeasure with the BSL move."

So whilst IBM gets control of Vault via Hashicorp they're still also, notionally at least, also involved in OpenBao.

Indeed I remember around the time of the rows when Hashicorp changed the majority of their software to BSL the rumour was that this licence change was *not* triggered (or at least not primarily) by issues around other companies making money off Terraform as seemed to be the public perception, rather it was because Hashicorp at the time were annoyed that apparently IBM's Professional Services department made far more money from selling Vault consultancy and services than Hashicorp's own enterprise sales did.

[Claptrap314]

Do they allow testing yet?

So about..6-7 years ago, I worked with Terraform for a few months. They were adamant that this was "configuration", so did not require testing. Never mind the loop unrolling, nested conditionals and variable substitutions.

I ended up creating custom modules in pure python so I could test things...

[Drakon]

Re: Do they allow testing yet?

I guess the point is that all inputs are known at runtime, so a non-applying plan should handle all of what you just listed and show you what the expected output would be