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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Broadcom VMware play. If you’re invested as an enterprise in the ecosystem, is going to be a while before you can extricate yourself. In the meantime, you must pay up.

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I'm pretty good at engineering fast moves. I took a company off of Salesforce in 45 days. VMware servers are even easier to changeout. Never done Terraform though.

terraform is OSS, unless you're using the hosted HCP version (workspaces? I think they're called), which, I've been using terraform heavily and at scale since v0.7 and I have never once thought I needed or would pay for something like that.

Terraform is not OSS, it switched to a source-available license over a year ago.

OpenTofu[0] is the OSS fork though.

[0]: https://github.com/opentofu/opentofu

Disclaimer: involved with OpenTofu

I'm well aware and have contributed to OpenTofu project in a small manner. I hope you'll forgive me slightly misspeaking - any version of terraform before that license change is OSS. It is, however, perfectly free to use and most companies I've worked with are hard-pinned on a particular version of terraform and rarely on the bleeding edge.

No worries, that makes sense!

And thanks for contributing :)

Yep. You're thinking of TFE. Workspaces and Stacks are the the advertised method for building composable infra.

This cowboy attitude doesn’t fly in regulated industries. Where VMware and co reign supreme

I've been in healthcare/finance for a decade. C level. I'm not a cowboy, I'm incredibly thorough, and I have a reputation for excellent work done fast. I'm in the third company for this PE firm because of the strong reputation I've created working at their companies. In 2021 they brought me in part-time consulting on one healthcare company where in 7 months I reorganized the IT structure, helping them land a very nice 9 figure exit.

My kind of operations work VERY well in highly regulated industries because I'm meticulous about regulations. Just because I can do it quickly doesn't mean I do it poorly, and I don't appreciate the assumption that I'm a "cowboy" being reckless.

And it would appear to me you are underinformed about how much migration off of VMware is really happening in these highly regulated industries. There's a tremendous amount of low-profile engineering going on to migrate away. No one is tipping off Broadcom because they don't want BCom to try turning the screws even more.

That's true, but it's easier to switch from Terraform to Pulumi than it is to move from VMware to some other virtualization platform.

secrets, too.

Org's already knee deep in vault / vault-agent for PKI and secrets wont be eager to switch.

But vault was already a pretty enterprise offering. I'd imagine most people running it had an existing contract.

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