Scaling HashiCorp with Armon Dadgar and Mitchell Hashimoto
HashiCorp was founded seven years ago with the goal of building infrastructure tools for automating cloud workflows such as provisioning, secret management, and service discovery. Hashicorp’s thesis was that operating cloud infrastructure was too hard: there was a need for new tools to serve application developers.
Hashicorp founders Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar began releasing open source tools to fulfill their vision of better automation. Terraform, Vagrant, Consul, and other tools created by Hashicorp gained popularity, and Hashicorp began iterating on their business model. Today, Hashicorp makes money by offering enterprise features and support to enterprises such as Pinterest, Adobe, and Cruise Automation.
Over the last seven years, enterprise software infrastructure has changed rapidly. First, enterprises moved from script-based infrastructure automation to container orchestration frameworks. Then, the container orchestration world consolidated around Kubernetes.
Today, large enterprises are rapidly adopting Kubernetes with a mix of public cloud and on-prem vendors. At the same time, these enterprises are also becoming more willing to consume proprietary tools from the public cloud providers.
Hashicorp has benefitted from all of this change. Their different tools fit into a variety of workflows, and are not closely coupled with any particular cloud provider or platform solution.
Armon and Mitchell join today’s show to discuss the business model and the product philosophy of HashiCorp. We also touch on service mesh, zero trust networking, and their lessons from the container orchestration wars.
