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The similarity between Otto and Waypoint are only skin deep: they both use the word "deploy." The way they deploy, their philosophies, etc. are COMPLETELY different. I talk about that in this comment a bit here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24790491

Waypoint is fully open source. There is no risk of it going closed source. If you are alluding to Otto here, Otto's source was never removed either, it is in the Git history of the project that's still on GitHub and we provided a one-click download link on the Otto website when we shut it down.

EDIT to add: If you're afraid of us shutting down projects, please note Otto is the only project in our entire history we shut down like that. So we don't (or shouldn't!) have the same reputation around that that Google has. Terraform was effectively failing (no growth) for almost 12 months and we stayed committed to that.

The concern here is probably more that they become effectively dead without vendor support. While some projects escape that fate they seem to be rare.

As ever but chicken meet egg.

I imagine that year lag time is what they call lagging indicators. I think with something like terraform it can take some time before it picks up serious steam that stays steady

Is there anything else they've discontinued though? Vagrant has waned in popularity given Docker, but it's still supported . Nomad is much less popular than Kubernetes, but it's still being actively developed, with features that make sense for its niche.

Sorry, I think my original comment is easy to misinterpret. I'm not saying I'm very worried that will happen, but I am mostly suggesting Hashicorp needs to be very careful post-launch to make sure people know this thing will be more of a Vagrant and less of an Otto :)

(And note that Vagrant was _extremely_ popular/'hot' for a time. It's still incredibly useful and widely used, even if it's not a slick new JS-based tool that everyone fawns over these days.)

Nobody wants another Google in terms of product support over time!

Nomad is still technically being supported, but looks looks to be low in priority and resources at the moment.

We've continued to grow the Nomad team, and are working towards the big 1.0 release milestone later this month. The OSS usage continues to grow double digit every quarter and our commercial offering generates millions in revenue. Nomad is also the backbone of both HashiCorp Cloud Platform and Terraform Cloud. Suffice to say, we continue to support Nomad and depend on it!

That's great to hear. I want to thank you for your work on Nomad. Its been a pleasure to use and has allowed us to scale without unnecessary complexity.

Awesome! I like Nomad a lot, I just know how hot and cold particular spaces can be.

On the contrary, the development of Nomad has really taken off over the last 9-12 months.

At the beginning of the year when my new team was starting to dig into the technologies we were going to be using in our new (to us) ecosystem, Nomad was hovering at the bottom of the list mainly from the lack of critical features we would be needing (namely, persistent storage solutions for containerized jobs but there were some other reasons I can't remember off the top of my head).

It was, I believe, around the 0.10 release that they laid out a roadmap for implementing the CSI spec on top of things like adding Autoscaling that we decided to go with it. This was back sometime before COVID lockdowns started and since then we've deployed it, along side Consul and Vault, to run our new internal production metrics/code coverage services.

Given we have committed to it, I've closely followed and have participated in it's development (in the form of a documentation contribution as well as assisting with a few issues related to the CSI implementation) and definitely believe the products development is moving much faster than it had been.

Keep in mind, Cloudflare is now using Nomad in (almost?) all of its data centers and Roblox has built out it's game server infrastructure using Nomad as it's orchestrator too. Hashicorp would be insane to throw away a product being used at that kind of scale.

Thanks, it's great to hear this kind of commitment. While it would certainly be possible to switch to Kubernetes if Nomad was ever abandoned, the thing is that I really wouldn't want to. Nomad, along with the rest of the Hashistack, is so much fun to use and feels so polished. Keep up the great work!

That's great to hear! I try not to buy into the "what's hot right now" mentality, but I'm just cautious after being left in the dark on products I've depended on. Glad they're continuing to invest in it.

When I think back to the era that Otto was released in it was a time of all sorts of vendors feeling the container adrenaline rush that made them think all they needed were containers to replicate the Heroku experience. Otto largely reflects that time in my opinion and a lot has happened in the container and control plane ecosystem since then. I respect HashiCorp's decision to pull the plug on it. (That's coming from someone who works somewhere that takes the complete opposite stance on these things so I'm fully aware of the trade offs.)

I've only skimmed the release blog post for Waypoint but from where I'm sitting it seems like a "meta Control Plane" which makes it a wildly different tool compared to Otto.

Please don't quote text in code blocks. Makes it incredibly difficult for mobile users to read. Reformatted for mobile users:

> It was an ambitious project, and we feel that it has not lived up to expectations. Rather than having a public project that does not meet HashiCorp standards, we have decided to close source the project so we can rethink its design and implementation. The source code is still available for download, but Otto will no longer be actively maintained or supported.

I wish HN had direct support for quotations. It would benefit the discussion culture and solve these formatting problems.

+1

It would also be nice if HN could fix the formatting of code blocks.