Announcing HashiCorp (a Company for Vagrant)

http://www.hashicorp.com/blog/announcing-hashicorp.html

by Argorak • 14 years ago

206 62 14 years ago

trotsky• 14 years ago

good luck! vagrant seems to fit a sweet spot in real world configuration management needs. i look forward to a future independent of oracle.

ukd1• 14 years ago

Congratulations and best of luck Mitchell!

mitchellh7• 14 years ago

I'm here to answer any questions, if you have them. I'm really excited!

Fun fact, I first "launched" Vagrant on HN almost exactly 1000 days ago: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1175901

gerad• 14 years ago

What's Vagrant?

dboat• 14 years ago

vagrant is a tool for automatically setting up ("provisioning") new vms, according to scripts.

For instance, once you have scripts that download and compile apache, php, python, and perhaps mysql and postgres, you can automatically create a new virtual machine with any combination of those things at any time. Even your applications can be automatically installed in a fresh development environment with a single command. It's great for allowing new developers to get going in their own environment on a team project, and good for you individually, if you have a lot of different things on the go, you can keep them isolated in their own environments and easily setup and destroy them at any time.

The value is adds is great, although it also adds a bit of inconvenience. If your OS likes to update virtualbox a lot, vagrant might suddenly stop working until they update it. Developing the scripts to provision a vm can take quite a bit of time. If you're doing lengthy compiles in the process and those compiles are failing, it can be slow to find out why. Once you get a module down, and it's solid, it's very nice to have.

stukpixel1• 14 years ago

Vagrant was amazingly helpful for my dev work this summer. Good to hear that you're making its development a priority.

I suppose my only question is if you plan on redesigning the Vagrant Docs website to be more like your attractive company landing page.

mitchellh7• 14 years ago

The Vagrant website and the docs website is being completely re-designed by the same designer. It is going to look _very_ attractive. :)

LeafStorm2• 14 years ago

Will it be possible to run development VMs in VirtualBox and production VMs in vSphere with the same Vagrantfile?

mitchellh7• 14 years ago

Yep.

blhack• 14 years ago

http://vagrantup.com/

A bit of constructive criticism:

The "this changes everything" thing has become way, way, overplayed. I saw that and immediately rolled my eyes and stopped reading. It is about at the level of "code ninja" now.

mitchellh7• 14 years ago

Thanks, I agree that I'm tired of that. The Vagrant website is being redesigned at the moment, so that'll disappear shortly.

typicalrunt• 14 years ago

You'd be surprised how many Enterprise companies are discovering Vagrant for the first time.

"You can have the same environment shared by everyone, and still look like Dev/QA/Production?" they ask.

It's amazing how far behind some companies are on the tech curve.

lyaunzbe• 14 years ago

Congratulations Mitchell! I have always admired your work and it is inspiring to see an such an evolution in your project. Kudos to whoever designed the site, it looks amazing!

rbolkey• 14 years ago

Congratulations as well! I've been using Vagrant mainly as a testing platform for authoring Puppet modules, and it's been wonderful.

joedevon• 14 years ago

Congrats! I'll hit you up about potentially setting up a training in Los Angeles.

aashay3• 14 years ago

Maybe this is a stupid question, but how do you pronounce HashiCorp? Is it "HAA-she" (rhymes with Kashi, like the cereal) or is it "HASH-i" (rhymes with "flashy")? I'm guessing it's the former since it'd match the Japanese pronunciation of your last name...?

mitchellh7• 14 years ago

Rhymes with Kashi. ^_^

sparkie• 14 years ago

The "ha" sound is like in hash, but it's a distinct syllable on it's own, without the "sh". The second syllable is more like "she". The "ha" and "shi" have the same weight, so the whole word is 2 syllables and 2 morae, unlike either of the two examples you gave (which are 3 morae each.)

It usually means "bridge" (橋) in the name Hashimoto, but can also mean "chopsticks" (箸) or "edge" (端), with a slightly different pitch (largely indistinguishable for non-speakers)

rhizome2• 14 years ago

"Kashi" is pronounced like "flashy."

dfischer• 14 years ago

Grats man. Happy for you.

nigelk• 14 years ago

Great news Mitch! Congratulations, and give us a yell if I can help with anything.

ramereth• 14 years ago

Congrats on launching your new company! Best of luck!

peralta• 14 years ago

First of all: congrats! I have been using Vagrant for a while now and it's how we manage the development and test environments (+200) in the company I work at (tuenti.com).

It is still not clear to me what the business model will be: will you be charging for selling extra providers (like VMWare Fusion), support contracts or ...?

paulsmith• 14 years ago

Can the first order of business be a renaming so the mascot of a useful and widely-used product isn't a homeless person?

mitchellh7• 14 years ago

The project won't be renamed, but it will be rebranded in the next few weeks. In the three years the project has existed I have only gotten two or three complaints about the mascot, but everyone has agreed that "Vagrant" itself is fine. Note that I've talked up to some pretty high levels of US government using Vagrant, and most are okay with it. One [fairly large/visible] organization within the US government has said they can't use it until the mascot is changed.

Vince the Vagrant is being retired.

evanphx• 14 years ago

Vince has a really good 401k plan, despite his scruff look. He's going to be sipping drinks on a Caribbean beach before we know it!

nicholassmith• 14 years ago

I actually like Vince the Vagrant as a mascot, but I can see why it could be troublesome.

kstenerud• 14 years ago

Maybe use a backpacker instead?

stevvooe• 14 years ago

What organization within the government is so vain that they can't use a great piece of technology due to a mascot?

dreamdu5t• 14 years ago

Vagrant is a VirtualBox with a bunch of packages pre-installed? Am I correct?

pearkes• 14 years ago

Nope - Vagrant is a tool for managing VM providers.

Virtualbox has been the main provider it manages. Part of this announcement includes adding support for more providers!

TallGuyShort• 14 years ago

If you frequently use VMs I suggest you checkout the example on their front page - it's super fast and I've found Vagrant to make a HUGE impact on my productivity and ability to use VMs for their intended purpose.

heyadam• 14 years ago

Congrats! Looking forward to see how Vagrant grows over the next couple years.

Hupo• 14 years ago

Congrats! I should probably get around to actually testing Vagrant one of these days too...

Also, the website looks absolutely gorgeous. Fantastic work there.

shizcakes• 14 years ago

Where can I go to find more information about Vagrant's plans for supporting more hypervisors than Virtualbox?

orangethirty2• 14 years ago

Use a backpacker for the mascot. It matches what the product does better. Homeless people dont have much stuff. Backpackers have and take their stuff everywhere. Which is the spirit of what you are doing. Have your stuff avaiable everywhere. So, a backpacker.

dekz• 14 years ago

I'm having trouble understanding your recommendation. Vagrants take ALL of their belongings with them, they have little where else to store any items they. Backpackers couldn't possibly take everything they own with them or they would by definition be Vagrants.

I think having a Vagrant as the mascot for Vagrant is the only obvious option.

orangethirty2• 14 years ago

Ok, my point is that both take their belogings with them. Backpackers take the stuff they need to travel around. Same as Vagrants, as you mentioned. But, to the market, having a Vagrant as a mascot might be seen in bad taste. Thus, to reduce the chance of rain over his parade, he could potentially just change mascots. That way, people who get easily offended by anything won't have an excuse to say anything. Plus, when this product gets more and more traction, people will question the mascot choice. That's why Frostred Flakes has Tony the Tiger, and not Bad Luck Johnny that lives under a bridge. Its all about perception. Though this is an issue some hacker don't get, because to them the world is black and white. Not saying it is you, of course. Just talking out loud.

Also, why the only obvious option?

Why couldn't it be a Puppy, Cat, Horse, Printer, Cloud, Keyboard, Fish, or anything else? Why the Vagrant? Its not obvious. For all the client know Vagrant might be an acronym or some made up tech name.

ecspike• 14 years ago

Came here to say hi and congrats Mitchell. Was fun hanging out in CZ, we should do it again, this time, stateside.

lixef• 14 years ago

@mitchellh Congratulations first! As I've been reading your tweets I've been guessing that you would starting, which focuses you on Vagrant.

I have a few questions: When did you think about the first time and when did you really decide to do this step? How do you start? Bootstrap it by your own or try to go with for a VC? How are you planning the addon open source/paid addon ratio will be like?

I wish you all the best for your company. And because I've been using Vagrant every day: Thank you very much.

mitchellh7• 14 years ago

> When did you think about the first time and when did you really decide to do this step?

The inkling of a possibility of something like this only entered my head around March/April 2012. I committed to the idea in June 2012.

> How do you start? Bootstrap it by your own or try to go with for a VC?

I'm attempting to bootstrap it on my own for now, because I think I have a solid foundation so there is a clear line to revenue. Of course, my runway to do this is much shorter than if I had VC funding. On the other hand, I have a lot more freedom without VC funding.

> How are you planning the addon open source/paid addon ratio will be like?

There will be many more open source add-ons, and I think it should be this way.

Thank YOU for using Vagrant. :)

minikomi2• 14 years ago

Just a heads up: Your favicon is almost identical to http://gree-corp.com/ , big social game maker in Japan.

cheapsteak• 14 years ago

It's a cube

Surely you can't trademark a cube?

minikomi2• 14 years ago

Fair enough. It's maybe not such a problem in the U.S. where the logo isn't in the media much, but to me the blue hexagon immediately triggered recognition. I'm only passing on the info.

kanwisher• 14 years ago

Any plans for helping unit test vm creation? One of the biggest problems I've had is trying to verify that my Chef installation works after each change

regularfry• 14 years ago

Excellent. I've been watching Vagrant from the sidelines. It's looking great, but it's useless to me until it gets a KVM backend.

sciurus• 14 years ago

Until it does, you might want to try McCloud.

https://github.com/jedi4ever/mccloud/

http://jedi.be/blog/2011/09/13/libvirt-fog-provider/

Announcing HashiCorp (a Company for Vagrant)

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