Armon Dadgar on HashiCorp Research, the Evolution of Infrastructure Tooling, and Standardisation

01 Oct 2024 (10 days ago)
Armon Dadgar on HashiCorp Research, the Evolution of Infrastructure Tooling, and Standardisation

HashiCorp Research and its Impact on Products

  • HashiCorp, a cloud infrastructure company, has a research division that strives to increase collaboration between academic computer science and the mainstream computing industry. (26s)
  • HashiCorp has incorporated fundamental computer science research into its products, such as Consul and Nomad. (3m51s)

Consul and Nomad: Built on Research

  • Consul and Nomad are built on foundational computer science algorithms and research, with Consul utilizing a consensus algorithm and raft at its core. (4m32s)
  • Console uses a distributed gossip layer and network coordinate system to function as a GPS for networks, enabling features like nearest neighbor routing. (5m11s)

Lifeguard: A Novel Extension to the Gossip Protocol

  • HashiCorp published a paper on Lifeguard, their novel extension to the gossip protocol, which improves the resilience of the system by addressing the issue of unhealthy nodes spreading misinformation. (6m56s)
  • HashiCorp presented the Lifeguard paper at DSN, an academic conference with an industry track, and received positive feedback, including from the original authors of the Swim protocol. (7m37s)

HashiCorp Research: Focus on Practical Applications

  • HashiCorp Research focuses on Industrial Research, prioritizing projects with practical applications or market viability within 18 to 24 months. (9m31s)
  • HashiCorp invests in three key areas: making tools more user-friendly, ensuring seamless integration with major communities and technologies like Kubernetes and serverless offerings, and enhancing the stability, scalability, and enterprise-readiness of their tools. (12m9s)

Incremental Improvements and User Focus

  • HashiCorp aims for incremental improvements rather than radical departures to avoid disrupting users in production environments. (13m42s)
  • HashiCorp has invested in learn.hashicorp.com, a learning platform with tutorials and a team dedicated to content creation, to help people learn and adopt tools like Terraform. (14m36s)

Community Engagement and Certification

  • A community portal was created to centralize questions and answers about HashiCorp products, addressing the issue of fragmented community discussions across various platforms. (14m51s)
  • HashiCorp plans to introduce certifications for their tools to help individuals demonstrate their expertise and employers to gauge competency levels. (15m42s)

Terraform: A Provisioning Tool for Diverse Environments

  • Terraform is a provisioning tool that can handle bare metal, virtual machines, containers, and serverless environments. (18m12s)
  • The network is a great common denominator that allows different technologies, such as mainframes, bare metal, virtual machines, and containers, to communicate with each other using TCP. (19m11s)

Importance of Standards for Interoperability

  • Standards are important for interoperability, especially in areas with high switching costs, such as telemetry, where retooling applications to switch providers can be a significant undertaking. (19m28s)

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