Mitchell Hashimoto talks multi-cloud, service mesh, and open source

Highlights:

What's the deal with HashiCorp?

• We're building the infrastructure of the future—but the future keeps evolving
• Also, we're building the company of the future—90% of HashiCorp's workforce is distributed internationally, by design
• Company culture is fiercely focused on kindness, honesty, humility, etc.
• Formed by two co-founders, who remain friends to this day
• Hired a CEO a few years ago so that the co-founders could concentrate on the things they're good at

The two phases of the enterprise cloud journey

• 2012: Enterprises started adoption, focused around one cloud choice, mainly AWS
• 2018: Enterprises more focused on heterogeneous, multi-cloud (including private data centers), and what Mitchell calls "the cloud operating model" mindset, including higher-level technologies such as Kubernetes, and elements such as automation and people-focused workflows.

Why is Kubernetes important?

• It's the scheduler idea, which Kubernetes is built on—that's the important thing
• Get away from looking at individual machines—or even from virtual machines—and view the infrastructure at a higher level
• Just assume the compute/storage/network resources are there—in a similar way to how we started assuming the memory was there when we moved to operating systems that supported virtual-memory. Make it somebody else's problem.
• It makes deployment so much more efficient, because the infrastructure is doing it for you, and can optimize it better
• It frees up people to focus on new challenges, rather than just dealing again and again with the old challenges

Service Mesh

• Service Mesh is one of those new challenges, Mitchell just mentioned
• Solves three fundamental problems: discoverability, configurability, and secure connectivity
• When you have thousands of services and they're appearing and disappearing dynamically, you must automate that, because no matter how much of a DevOps wizard you are, it doesn't scale
• Security changes from perimeter or host-based security to identity and service-based security
• It's an important game-changer, but requires a hard shift in mindset—it's a worthwhile shift, but hard

Vision 2029

• Whether you're a two-person startup or a F500 company, start with one "stem-cell" server and let it go
• And by a process of replication or reproduction, your infrastructure can scale to Facebook-level and beyond

The role of open source

• Today, it's almost default, expected pattern—or at the very least accepted
• Better for transparency—no need to go via a sales person
• Customers can see exactly how it works, rather than relying on marketing
• Ability to make their mark on the software, perhaps to get their career started
• Building a successful business around open source is challenging
• You need a healthy tension between diverse, shared ownership of a community, and the unified vision of a company or benevolent dictator—without the latter, you end up with a camel instead of a horse