
HashiCorp has raised $100 million in Series D funding - agotterer
https://globenewswire.com/news-release/2018/11/01/1641376/0/en/HashiCorp-Raises-100-Million-to-Help-Enterprises-Adopt-Multi-Cloud.html
======
mitchellh
Hello, I'm one of the founders of HashiCorp! We're super excited about this.
I'm really proud of the team that got us to this point, thankful to our
communities, and just generally excited about the future for us.

The project that really kicked off HashiCorp was Vagrant, and I "launched" it
right here on HN over 8 years ago:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901)
So its always fun to see things come back around. :) For those that are less
familiar these days, HashiCorp now has many major OSS projects: Vagrant,
Packer, Consul, Terraform, Vault, Nomad (in addition to lots of minor ones and
libraries) addressing different areas.

For the HN crowd, there are a couple background viewpoints that I would also
like to share that may be helpful on painting the backdrop on the product and
business behind HashiCorp. A first quick one is my tweet on the four
dimensions for "multi-cloud":
[https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1022162653618135040](https://twitter.com/mitchellh/status/1022162653618135040)
At HashiCorp we're mostly looking at enabling #1 (workflow portability),
though that has downstream effects of helping with the other dimensions as
well.

Second, I often get asked "Why multi-cloud?" And I wrote up a fairly long
answer on Reddit about that with real examples that I recommend:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/91afzz/why_multiclo...](https://www.reddit.com/r/devops/comments/91afzz/why_multicloud/e2x156y/)

While I'm happy to answer any questions, this post is rather late for me local
time (past 10:30 PM here) and I'm leaving tomorrow to get married this weekend
so I can't promise anything!

~~~
pjungwir
Congratulations! I've been a fan of Vagrant for a long time and have done some
Vault as well. I haven't yet had a chance to try Terraform, but everyone says
it is better than Cloudformation. :-)

I'm curious what you think of this crazy idea?:

With databases, some ecosystems use declarative migrations, where you keep a
description of your schema, and the system automatically takes you from here
to there. I've heard .Net people say how nice this is. On the other hand with
Rails & Django you have delta scripts that give imperative directions for
getting from here to there, rather than a declaration of the end state. I like
that solution a lot, because sometimes you need more control over what to do.
(For example, changing a one-to-many relationship to many-to-many, and moving
the existing data.)

It seems to me that Cloudformation and Terraform take the declarative approach
to cloud management, and there is no tool for the imperative approach.
(Cloudformation has Change Sets but you can't write those or edit them; they
just tell you its plan.) Resizing your database's EBS volume may be an example
where you want to give careful instructions. Try that in Cloudformation and it
will destroy the old volume and attach a new one. :-)

I'd love a tool that lets you keep a history of "cloud migrations", where you
write both the "up" and the "down". It could be as simple as some organization
around a bunch of fog/boto/aws-sdk scripts, although it would be even nicer if
it had helper methods like in Rails, e.g. add_autoscaling_group, and those
would usually know how to reverse themselves.

The _really_ great feature would be to have "transactional DDL" for cloud
migrations. With database migrations you get this for Postgres but not MySQL,
and it's really nice. I know this isn't 100% possible, but CloudFormation
comes close already with its rollback attempts. You'd definitely need your own
layer of helper methods for this, because I can't imagine implementing it
without something like a Command pattern. (The way AWS auto-generates their
API tools, maybe it wouldn't even be that difficult to generate an identical
API that just records what you want to do.)

I've pitched this idea a few times to AWS people, but maybe you should do it
instead. :-)

Anyway, Hashicorp has contributed a ton to my developer happiness, so I wish
you great success. Oh, and congratulations on your wedding!

~~~
scarface74
_It seems to me that Cloudformation and Terraform take the declarative
approach to cloud management, and there is no tool for the imperative
approach._

With CloudFormation you can use custom lambda backed resources.

~~~
pjungwir
Hmm, thanks for mentioning this. It looks like it's just over a month old?
Here are the docs I found:

[https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGui...](https://docs.aws.amazon.com/AWSCloudFormation/latest/UserGuide/template-
custom-resources-lambda.html)

[https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/cloudformation-
macros/](https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/cloudformation-macros/)

That could be really useful!

~~~
scarface74
It’s been around for at least two years from what I can tell.

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luckylittle
I love Hashicorp products and i personally used most of them throughout my
career, so big congratulations. The only thing i was always wondering is how
are you planning to make money? It feels a bit like Docker - great technology,
supported by big fundings, but the business side of things is very immature...

~~~
mitchellh
We're not comfortable talking about revenue publicly, but HashiCorp is an
extremely healthy business at the moment. We've doubled revenue ( at least,
maybe more ;) ) two years in a row and thats from a starting point of
7-figures. If we chose to halt hiring and growth, we could very easily be
profitable today even with the 350 employees we have. But we're still seeing
really strong growth and so we're continuing to invest!

------
matthewmacleod
Great news! The HashiCorp stack has really made my infrastructure work a much
more enjoyable thing. Nomad and Consul in particular are wonderful antidotes
to the complexity of Kubernetes for setups that don't require all of its
features.

------
busterarm
Terraform has become a big part of my professional life. It has become a force
multiplier in my ability to solve large problems. I've liked it enough to
regularly contribute to provisioners and make documentation improvements.

Thank you!

------
sitkack
Good for them! HashiCorp is solid engineering.

------
davidjnelson
That’s awesome. It’s a powerful idea to abstract cloud resource provisioning.
Makes multi cloud much simpler.

~~~
whalesalad
Terraform is the best you can get right now but it’s still so incredibly
painful to use. Every team I’ve ever been a part of is ultimately building a
custom framework on top of terraform to spit out .tf files. It’s so
frustrating.

~~~
mitchellh
I wish our HashiConf videos were up but they won't be up for another week or
so. But the major theme for our Terraform announcements was "listening &
reacting." We've been spending a lot of time with users/customers and
listening to their feedback and we wanted to show that we're committed to
that. Without going into the whole thing, a couple highlights are Terraform
0.12 and our commitment to collaboration for everyone. Both linked below.
Hopefully these help a lot but we're definitely trying to make it easier to
use across the board!

Terraform 0.12:
[https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/terraform-0-1-2-preview](https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/terraform-0-1-2-preview)
It is in alpha right now (we've shipped 2 alpha releases over 2 weeks) and
we're burning down bugs to get that out as quickly as possible.

Terraform Collaboration for Everyone:
[https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/terraform-collaboration-
for-e...](https://www.hashicorp.com/blog/terraform-collaboration-for-everyone)

~~~
raziel2p
Where do you go to find this feedback? Anywhere in particular or just reading
all over the internet?

~~~
technofiend
They hired a TerraForm customer named Kristin Laemmert away from Nike and she
gave an in depth talk on new language features in HCL such as for loops. She
demonstrated a ton of before and after code snippets that included hacks she
had to make in HCL to get things to work.

She was pretty clear at least some of the work was in-flight before she
started at Hashi so it seems they're using community input as well.

------
amasad
I'm curious what's HashiCorp's flagship product? Is it really a combination of
all their various projects?

I only use Vagrant but it seems like it's in the process of being deprecated
or at least de-emphasized.

~~~
mitchellh
(I'm one of the founders of HashiCorp)

Consul, Nomad, Terraform, and Vault are the only products that have associated
enterprise products (in addition to being open source). Different products
have different impacts different quarters but all of them are contributing
many millions per year individually.

Vagrant and Packer do not have enterprise products and we don't try to
monetize them much (Vagrant Cloud has some paid plans for box hosting but
primarily so that we remain cost neutral). However, we're fully committed to
them and both teams have full time engineering and management assigned to
them. They're not deprecated in any way.

~~~
person_of_color
How do the products bring in $ if they are OSS?

~~~
nazri1
For any OSS products that claims to make money you can check their product
page and see if they put out some pricing information. For example
[https://www.hashicorp.com/products/consul](https://www.hashicorp.com/products/consul)

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BookPage
I've been using hashicorp products almost my entire professional life (8
years). I'm really happy to hear this news.

------
setquk
Congratulations.

Please don't sell out to IBM in the future.

