The Beginning of the End for Terraform?

https://medium.com/netpremacy-global-services/the-beginning-of-the-end-for-terraform-cfffcd2c5420

by lockedinspace • 2 years ago

30 21 2 years ago

I guess most companies now a days just say open-source to get some initial traction, nut no worries it will get a fork like redis did if they change the license.

lockedinspace• 2 years ago

There's already a fork, OpenTofu https://opentofu.org/

mrbishalsaha3• 2 years ago

Why is it happening so often now? Most OS companies changing their licenses...?

lijok3• 2 years ago

If anything Terraform will get reinvigorated. I'd bet IBM will reverse the license change by the end of the year.

This leads me to my first concern, IBM has a conflict of interest. IBM has a cloud offering, admittedly with a 1.8% market share. Why would they want to keep developing tools that frankly benefit their competitors more than them?

Because they'll make bank off of Hashicorp Cloud Platform.

Another option is to ‘go native,’ with each of the big three hyperscalers offering its dedicated options: Cloud Formation with AWS, Bicep with Azure, and Config Controller in Google Cloud.

Not an option. People manage way, way more than just AWS, Azure and GCP with Terraform. GitHub, Cloudflare, Tailscale, etc ...

It's an interesting time for Hashistack for sure, but I don't think the industry is prepared to move away from the tooling.

rgrmrts• 2 years ago

Because they'll make bank off of Hashicorp Cloud Platform

I’m curious what you think IBM will do differently to make bank, considering Hashicorp failed to make bank from their cloud platform offerings.

lijok3• 2 years ago

They’ll sell it

serbrech• 2 years ago

Bicep has the potential to provide a cross platform solution, but it’s unclear whether that’s the direction: https://github.com/radius-project/bicep-types-aws

szszrk• 2 years ago

I would not expect that to happen any time soon. Maybe they will see a chance to promote bicep more by such move. Yet until now they actively (and reasonably) advise in their docs Terraform use, if you consider multicloud and few other situations.

I would rather expect MS to declare support for OpenTofu. They don't even have to be involved in it directly.

The main work is ensuring azure providers compatibility (which is formally maintained by hashi). Add compatibility with Tofu to Azure Verified Modules [0] (a great project btw), and we have a clean way out of this by providing real help where it's most needed.

[0] https://azure.github.io/Azure-Verified-Modules/

nunez• 2 years ago

"Who will buy HashiCorp" was the question that everyone was asking for basically their entire existence.

Vagrant, Terraform, Vault, Consul and Nomad were just too good. HashiCorp's biggest competitor against Terraform and Vault Enterprise was their own stuff! If your platform team was even moderately competent, you had no need for any of that stuff, especially at the prices they were asking for!

Personally, I was hoping for Microsoft to acquire them.

Terraform as a replacement for ARM is _literally_ the dream, and Vault would have been a really good underlying service for Azure Key Vault.

Now that I think about it, I'd love a universe in which GitHub is Azure DevOps, TFE-but-better is Azure RM, and Vault is Azure Key Vault. Alas, that is not reality.

I want to think that Microsoft made a bid but lost out to IBM.

All that said, OpenTofu is a drop-in replacement for Terraform; nearly zero work required. I haven't tried OpenBao yet, but I presume that it's the same situation there. There's enough steam propelling them to make me think that they'll pull through for the long haul.

merb• 2 years ago

OpenBao yet, but I presume that it's the same situation there

no, they removed a lot of things, espeically on the storage side.

sirspacey• 2 years ago

I can reassure on one point - why would IBM support an inherently multi-cloud platform?

Because at less than 2% market share they are a beneficiary.

The main reason orgs move to multi-cloud is they have to support another cloud for business reasons - AI, cost optimization, etc.

When they replatform internal ops to Terraform any cloud provider can become a viable option. Beforehand, not at all.

Why IBM might not be successful with this acquisition, it is likely the only way they could really grow market share.

The Beginning of the End for Terraform?

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