An accurate title would be "IBM archives the IBM-HashiCorp Boundary Community Edition repo".
Community Editions don't make sense to the MBAs at IBM unless killing those off would create a global backlash (loss of goodwill for no positive revenue outcome is not good to an MBA. If loss of goodwill however, results in positive revenue, that's a good thing to an MBA. This is a well regarded MBA concept called "enshittification"). MBAs know that anything that doesn't directly translate into either viral growth or revenue next quarter is a waste of investor dollars. That makes anything else a risk to their own careers.
Boundary is past its viral growth stage, so the MBA needs to see revenue next quarter. Boundary fails the test there, so off with it!
HashiCorp was an innovative company founded by two engineers that built a lot of foundational, transformational infra products. Then, in a growth frenzy based off the traction of these tools they raised tremendous, vast sums of money and subsequently ~lost control of their vision~ hired MBAs, and the company went down the drain as well.
What remains of those tools are a BSL that focuses on maintenance operations and feature requests that strictly rides along a cost-benefit analysis of rent seeking behavior off IBM's contracts with organizations that had already embraced those tools.
I recall talking to a HashiCorp rep about Boundary and the ability to find a place for it. Still seems kind of niche. I guess it never really found its place as a CE version.
No. Infisical is headed the same direction. Most of the PAM bits that matter are not even in the open source repo, you need a paid license to get access.
That might work for end user facing services but isn't the best fit for infrastructure. For infrastructure, you need something that people in the business understand well, are comfortable using, speaks the same language of operations so that vocabulary is well understood, and battle tested in production.
That's why Kubernetes has gained a lot of traction, not because 99% of companies need the scalability of Kubernetes, but it is a well understood concept, suite of services, and the vocabulary is very common now and well understood.
Nomad is a great fit for most compared to Kubernetes but failed to gain adoption because of these reasons.
Community Editions don't make sense to the MBAs at IBM unless killing those off would create a global backlash (loss of goodwill for no positive revenue outcome is not good to an MBA. If loss of goodwill however, results in positive revenue, that's a good thing to an MBA. This is a well regarded MBA concept called "enshittification"). MBAs know that anything that doesn't directly translate into either viral growth or revenue next quarter is a waste of investor dollars. That makes anything else a risk to their own careers.
Boundary is past its viral growth stage, so the MBA needs to see revenue next quarter. Boundary fails the test there, so off with it!
HashiCorp was an innovative company founded by two engineers that built a lot of foundational, transformational infra products. Then, in a growth frenzy based off the traction of these tools they raised tremendous, vast sums of money and subsequently ~lost control of their vision~ hired MBAs, and the company went down the drain as well.
What remains of those tools are a BSL that focuses on maintenance operations and feature requests that strictly rides along a cost-benefit analysis of rent seeking behavior off IBM's contracts with organizations that had already embraced those tools.
That's why Kubernetes has gained a lot of traction, not because 99% of companies need the scalability of Kubernetes, but it is a well understood concept, suite of services, and the vocabulary is very common now and well understood.
Nomad is a great fit for most compared to Kubernetes but failed to gain adoption because of these reasons.