I’m genuinely excited about why I believe IBM’s acquisition of HashiCorp is such a fantastic move in the tech realm.

This post is a reflection of my own opinions and not influenced by any organization , firm , vendor or any individual in my personal or professional sphere .

The thought evoked more than a couple of years back when I started working with Red Hat OpenShift and found it an amazing solution to deploy cloud native applications .There has never been a pause with the way we have evolved with architecturing our applications . From Mainframe to Three-Tier to Service Oriented to Micro Services and now Containerized Microservices . It is certain that the world will witness more in the days to come .

In fact when it comes to Red Hat OpenShift , I have probably been through 500+ discussions trying to narrate why OpenShift and why not Kubernetes . Long story cut short . “Have you been working on Unix or a particular flavor of Linux ?” You can probably achieve everything in Kubernetes whatever you do with OpenShift but that’s only possible when you have 1000x more time to deliver your services . We live in an era where we buy time with money :-) .

Coming back to the OpenShift saga , I also started with Ansible almost the same time I started with OpenShift and found it indispensable when it comes to for a wide range of tasks including configuration management, application deployment, and orchestration. While Ansible can also manage infrastructure, its focus is broader, encompassing tasks like software installation, configuration file management, and executing ad-hoc commands on remote systems. And once again I was reinforced
to think that we indeed live in an era where we buy time with money :-)

It is almost at the same time that I also have been through 300+ discussions trying to make my stakeholders understand that Terraform and Ansible are not alternatives to each other . Four years back I attended a particular interview where the panel was supposed to assess my Terraform expertise and unfortunately the panelist was late due to the age old problem of getting delayed to office due to traffic congestion on the road . They arranged someone with Ansible knowledge instead , thinking that
Ansible = Terraform :-) .

Terraform is primarily used for provisioning and managing infrastructure resources in a declarative manner. It allows you to define your infrastructure as code using a configuration language (HashiCorp Configuration Language — HCL or JSON) and then automatically creates, updates, and deletes the necessary resources to match the desired state. Read my explanation of Ansible above to understand the exact difference .

Circling back to the OpenShift saga I always used to think the missing gap while working with OpenShift , Ansible and Cloud Infrastructure . While Red Hat owns the first two I would often wish to see Terraform being managed by IBM/Red Hat and I never could comprehend that I was just few months away from my wish . Yes , Terraform is now officially an IBM thing and I think this will open the gates to let an avalanche of opportunities hit the DevOps community .

How ??

>> Using Terraform one can use Infrastructure as a Code to prepare the Cloud Infrastructure for deploying OpenShift cluster .
>> Using Ansible playbook one can define and deploy the OpenShift cluster in the Infrastructure being provisioned by Terraform .
>> Using OpenShift one can orchestrate the containers in the Pods for the cloud native application . Welcome to the world of services , routes , helm charts , Ingress , PVC , PV and lot of other goodies !!
>> Using Ansible one can further manage configuration of the OpenShift Cluster .
>> While all these are being executed one should not forget the efficient way we let OpenShift Pipelines ( Tekton ) manage the CI/CD pipeline .

Don’t you think it’s amazing to put the best Hybrid Cloud Solutions under one umbrella so as to seamlessly manage the Product Line and Customer Demand ?

HashiCorp has a strong presence among cloud-native startups and enterprises adopting modern software development practices. IBM’s acquisition of HashiCorp will not only expand its reach in these segments but will also potentially influence the direction of the broader DevOps and cloud ecosystem.

I have also been closely observing all the recent acquisitions of IBM of late starting from Red Hat to Turbonomic to Instana to Apptio to Envizi to Ahana to …….…. to Hashicorp and I am certain that products under these vendors have been maintaining their essence as strongly as they were while operating solo in the markets.

A myriad opportunities await both for IBM and for customers in the cloud and DevOps space with this acquisition . Can’t wait to see the benefits ushering soon !!