Open Source and HashiCorp
When Mitchell and Armon created their first automation tool projects, they had no idea they would eventually build a company around their ideas. They learned the theory of computer science through university, but the practice of building software and communities through open source software, so making their projects open source was a natural choice. Over time, however, they found a powerful range of additional benefits. In fact, as they built HashiCorp, open source began impacting huge swaths of enterprise computing, and the first few large, profitable open source companies began to emerge. Over the past few years, major innovation in the industry has shifted to open source becoming the dominant way forward for infrastructure providers. We remain committed that the core of our technology will always remain open source.
250 million
Open source software downloads
(as of FY22)5,700
OSS Contributors
A Successful Business Model
By 2016, HashiCorp offered both open source and commercial versions of many of its tools. Today, we have eight open source tools in our portfolio: Packer, Vagrant, Terraform, Consul, Boundary, Vault, Nomad, and Waypoint. Terraform, Consul, Vault, and Nomad have enterprise version offerings, and Terraform, Consul, and Vault are also offered as HashiCorp managed service offerings, with both free and paid tiers.
We continue to offer our products as open source because we believe that by elevating developers and practitioners to innovate in infrastructure, it helps enable the creation of broad ecosystems, and allows organizations to more easily solve integration problems and seamlessly adopt common workflows across any infrastructure element.
Our commercial products are designed to provide a central control point for the use of that specific technology in an organization. We aim to drive standardization to accelerate the benefit to practitioners operating and developing in multi-cloud environments. We are proud to count more than 5,000 contributors to HashiCorp projects, as well as more than 250 million open source downloads a year. Organizations that use HashiCorp open source tools include Cloudflare, Condé Nast, DataDog, Instacart, Peloton, Rubrik, Salesforce, Slack, Stripe, the New York Times, and thousands of others.