Today is another day in the sun for open source! HashiCorp has announced an enormous $100 Million round on a unicorn valuation of $1.9 Billion. HashiCorp launched in 2012, which we covered around the same time with founder and creator Mitchell Hashimoto, and again a year later shortly after officially forming HashiCorp with Armon Dadgar. Ron Miller of TechCrunch included this pull-quote to give context to HashiCorp’s roots. After graduating and getting jobs, Hashimoto and Dadgar reunited in 2012 and launched HashiCorp. They decided to break their big problem down into smaller, more manageable pieces and eventually built the five open source tools currently on offer. In fact, they found as they developed each one, the community let them know about adjacent problems and they layered on each new tool to address a different need. Over the years, HashiCorp has been in our newsfeed and on our podcasts regularly — so dig into the archives while we make plans to sync up with Mitchell on the future plans of HashiCorp.

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Adam Stacoviak and Andrew Thorp talk with Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator of Vagrant and founder of HashiCorp.

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Vagrant, the tool for building and distributing work environments, which we covered in one of our podcasts, has been growing and changing a lot in the last few months. Most notably, Mitchell Hashimoto, the creator and maintainer of the project, has launched HashiCorp - a company to help drive the development forward. He wrote a great article on why he decided to launch HashiCorp now, and I encourage you to read it. The best way to summarize the change comes from the article itself: I must stress that Vagrant will always remain open source and liberally licensed. The difference moving forward is that I will be working on it full-time. As always, you can visit Vagrant’s website or view the source on GitHub.

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Seth Vargo, the Director of Technical Advocacy at HashiCorp, joined the show to talk about managing secrets with their open source product called Vault which lets you centrally secure, store, and tightly control access to secrets across distributed infrastructure and applications. We talked about Seth’s back story into open source, use cases, what problem it solves, key features like Data Encryption, why they choose to write it in Go, and how they build tooling around the open core model.

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Mitchell Hashimoto joined the show to talk about HashiCorp’s new tool - Otto, how it compares to and compliments Vagrant, Automation, and we even talked to Mitchell about his history with software development in the beginning of the show.

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gaia is an open source automation platform which makes it easy and fun to build powerful pipelines in any programming language. Based on HashiCorp’s go-plugin and gRPC, gaia is efficient, fast, lightweight and developer friendly. Gaia is currently alpha! Do not use it for mission critical jobs yet!

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As we move into this world of loosely connected VMs, containers, and servers we need a layer that tells everything where everything else is. Serf is Hashicorp’s solution for this problem. Serf is a decentralized solution for service discovery and orchestration that is lightweight, highly available, and fault tolerant. Are you wondering why you might need this? Let’s say you have an app that requires Redis. You could put Redis inside your container, but then every app server you push would have its own copy of Redis. Instead you might want to have a Redis container and an app container. Of course, when you only have two containers it wouldn’t be hard to hand manage the connection. When you increase the number of elements in the system the complexity increases as well. This is where service orchestration come in. It helps handle the complexity. Serf is one solution to this problem.

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Last weekend the folks at 1Password put out a tweet saying they were going down for a few hours to replace AWS CloudFormation with HashiCorp Terraform. The tweet got a lot of attention, particularly from people running or managing their services. It is like creating a brand new universe, from scratch. This post will go into technical details and I apologize in advance if I explain things too quickly. I tried to make up for this by including some pretty pictures but most of them ended up being code snippets.

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There’s another gorilla to consider for container orchestration. Kubernetes is the 800-pound gorilla of container orchestration. It powers some of the biggest deployments worldwide, but it comes with a price tag. Especially for smaller teams, it can be time-consuming to maintain and has a steep learning curve. For what our team of four wanted to achieve at trivago, it added too much overhead. So we looked into alternatives — and fell in love with Nomad. From the Nomad website: HashiCorp Nomad is a single binary that schedules applications and services on Linux, Windows, and Mac. It is an open source scheduler that uses a declarative job file for scheduling virtualized, containerized, and standalone applications. Anyone from the community with experience using Nomad? Let us know in the discussion below.

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