It’s always nice to see a quiet achiever gain some recognition for its success
Seemingly every company under the sun is now a DevOps leader—even ones that, while purporting to be about a new way of doing things, continue to market legacy, monolithic products and services.
So, it’s nice to see some genuine players achieve success and recognition in this space. A good example of this is HashiCorp—an important, but little-known DevOps vendor. The company manages a host of open-source tools, all of which tick of different parts of the application and infrastructure lifecycle.
+ Also on Network World: The shift to DevOps requires a new approach to security +
HashiCorp’s tools—Vagrant, Packer, Terraform, Serf, Consul, Vault and Nomad—jointly and separately allow technologists to remove tools as a barrier to greater organizational agility. While most people would agree that agility is a cultural mindset and not about tools, it is fair to say that it’s certainly easier to create agility when the tool more readily allows it.
As a business, HashiCorp offers enterprise versions of Terraform, Vault, Consul and Nomad that enhance the respective open-source tools with enterprise features that promote collaboration, policy validation and automation. The company was founded by Mitchell Hashimoto and Armon Dadgar in 2012 with the goal of revolutionizing data center management across development, operations and security.
“Armon and I founded HashiCorp to make development, operations and security easier so organizations could focus on building the applications of the future. The rate of open source and commercial adoption of our technology has been tremendous,” Hashimoto said. “The productivity of the HashiCorp team is inspiring, and I’m excited to continue the journey together to bring DevOps infrastructure to even more organizations.”
Hashimoto is right about that rate of uptake. Some interesting statistics from the company and the open-source projects it manages:
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HashiCorp had its first seven-figure revenue quarter after only nine months of enterprise sales. Customers include Conde Nast, Cisco and Mozilla.
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Weekly open-source downloads are up 125 percent in the first six months of this year, adding to the community of several million monthly active users.
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HashiCorp has created a rich ecosystem of partners, including Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, Microsoft Azure, VMware and GitHub.
Add to those metrics some impressive fundraising ones: The company today announced a sweet $24 million Series B funding round, taking total funding to date to $34 million. The round was led by GGV Capital, with Mayfield, True Ventures and new investor Redpoint also participating. All of these backers are, of course, banking on the idea that a gathering momentum is occurring in terms of large enterprises wanting to become more agile. As they do so, tools such as those offered by HashiCorp become more important.
It’s no coincidence, then, that HashiCorp also announced general availability for its enterprise version of Vault. Vault allows security teams to enforce policies for applications and infrastructure. HashiCorp rightly points out that IT security today has new challenges:
“The shift to highly elastic, microservice architectures requires a different approach to security. Static network-based security is poorly equipped to handle the dynamic application-centric infrastructures being built today,” said Dadgar, co-founder and co-CTO of HashiCorp. “Vault Enterprise enables organizations to adopt DevOps practices in their approach to security and keep pace with development and operations teams that are adopting DevOps.”
The enterprise version adds important functionality to the regular open-source version—a single user interface for security management, health alerts and monitoring and workflows for managing the various security processes.
My POV
HashiCorp is a somewhat invisible player in the space despite it having a vast range of both open source and commercial products. This funding round, and the rolling out of increased enterprise products and features, should help the company gain more attention and visibility.
