IBM Acquires HashiCorp for $6.4 billion

HashiCorp accelerates automation for the multi cloud platform. It provides industry standard way of cloud provisioning. HashiCorp organization was started in 2012 and it was started as hobby project. Back then there were very less deployments happens in the cloud. HashiCorp built array of products to automate the deployments. It makes infrastructure as a service easier.

IBM set to acquire HashiCorp for $6.4 Billion. The acquisition will be completed by this year end. Both the companies have approved the deal.

HashiCorp flagship products include

TerraForm is an infrastructure as code tool that lets you build, change, and version infrastructure safely and efficiently. It helps to manage resources in any cloud platform or data center. Users can code the infrastructure, build the way they want, apply policy and scale it.

Packer  provides organizations with a single workflow to build cloud and private datacenter images and continuously manage them throughout their lifecycle. It creates identical images for multiple platforms from a single source configuration.

Nomad is an easy-to-use, flexible, and performant workload orchestrator that can deploy a mix of microservice, batch, containerized, and non-containerized applications

Vault is tool to manage secrets management, encryption as a service, and privileged access management.

Consul is a distributed, highly available, and data center aware solution to connect and configure applications across dynamic, distributed infrastructure. It provides services like Service Mesh, API Gateway, Service Discovery.

HashiCorp is an industry leader in cloud automation and they have open sourced most of their products and it is available in Github. The source code is released under Business Source License.

It is a good decision for IBM to acquire HashiCorp as they can increase their portfolio. RedHat has many products and HashiCorp can compliment them. IBM can offer better services to their customers. For HashiCorp, this deal would be a great move as they will get more customer base. Overall its a Win-Win situation to both of them.

When someone acquires a open source company, the question comes what will happen to the open source projects. Will IBM support them? For those who are nervous and  disappointed about the merger can consider OpenTofu as a alternative to TerraForm.