HashiCorp: Building the Builders' Tools, And Learning From Within

•5 min read
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HashiCorp has carved out a significant niche in the software world, providing essential open-source and commercial tools that empower organizations to provision, secure, connect, and run their cloud infrastructure. With powerhouses like Terraform for infrastructure as code, Vault for secrets management, Consul for service networking, and Nomad for application orchestration, one would expect HashiCorp to be an ardent user of its own product suite. Indeed, the company's philosophy and the interconnected nature of its tools suggest a deep internal reliance that inevitably shapes their development.

While HashiCorp may not have an extensive public library of "we eat our own dog food" case studies in the traditional marketing sense, the evidence of their internal usage and its impact is apparent. The company champions "The Infrastructure Cloud," a concept promoting a unified platform for managing the entire lifecycle of infrastructure and security resources. This vision itself implies that HashiCorp's teams would be the first and most critical users, ensuring these tools work harmoniously and effectively at scale.

A particularly insightful example comes from the operational experience of their Terraform Cloud service. As detailed in a discussion about "Using Temporal at Hashicorp," the Terraform Cloud team initially ran their services on large Nomad clusters. However, they encountered significant "blast radius" issues, where a problem in a single large cluster could impact all customers. This real-world operational challenge, using their own Nomad for a critical service, led them to re-architect their systems. They implemented a cellular architecture with shuffle sharding to mitigate this risk, breaking down the infrastructure into smaller, isolated Nomad clusters.

Interestingly, to manage these now numerous Nomad clusters effectively and orchestrate complex workflows, HashiCorp turned to an external tool: Temporal. They even went on to build an internal "Compute API" using Temporal to allow their teams to manage workloads across these Nomad clusters in a self-service manner. This decision is a hallmark of a mature engineering culture – one that leverages its own tools where they shine but isn't afraid to integrate best-of-breed external solutions to solve specific, complex problems that arise from using their own products at scale. The lessons learned from managing Nomad in such a demanding, multi-tenant environment undoubtedly feed back into Nomad's own development, future features, and best-practice recommendations for users facing similar scaling challenges.

Beyond this specific, documented instance, the general development and integration of the HashiCorp stack point to extensive internal use:

  • Integrated Ecosystem: Tools like Consul-Terraform-Sync, which automates network infrastructure based on Consul's service discovery, or the tight integration between Vault and other HashiCorp products for secure credential injection, are indicative of a development process that understands the real-world interplay between these components. Such integrations are best forged and refined through firsthand operational experience.
  • Addressing Complexity: HashiCorp's products tackle inherently complex domains. Vault, for instance, while incredibly powerful for secrets management, is often cited by users for its "Complex Setup and Configuration" and "Steep Learning Curve" (Configu, "HashiCorp Vault: 6 Alternatives & Competitors You Should Know"). It's reasonable to assume that HashiCorp's own engineers encounter these complexities. This internal friction can be a powerful driver for improving documentation, streamlining workflows, enhancing user interfaces, and developing better operational patterns for their products – benefiting the entire user community.
  • Open Source Ethos: HashiCorp's strong roots in open source mean their tools are scrutinized and contributed to by a vast community. However, the core development and vision are steered by HashiCorp. Being primary users of their own open-source tools allows their internal teams to act as "customer zero," identifying critical bugs, usability issues, and feature gaps long before they might be reported by the wider community. This helps in "enabling practitioners," a core tenet mentioned on their website (HashiCorp, "Open Source and HashiCorp").

However, this internal usage isn't without its potential blind spots. When a company becomes deeply enmeshed in its own ecosystem, there's always a risk of developing solutions that are highly optimized for their specific internal way of working, potentially missing broader market needs or alternative approaches. The decision to use Temporal, in a way, highlights a recognition of this; rather than trying to force-fit or build a less suitable internal solution for workflow orchestration at that scale, they adopted an external tool.

Furthermore, the primary focus of HashiCorp's tools on infrastructure and platform teams within often large organizations means their internal usage might not always reflect the experience of smaller teams or individual developers who might find the operational overhead of some tools challenging.

In conclusion, HashiCorp's journey of building and using its own foundational infrastructure tools is a compelling narrative. The internal operational stresses, particularly those encountered by services like Terraform Cloud running on Nomad, provide invaluable, real-world feedback loops that are crucial for refining these powerful but complex products. While they don't shy away from adopting external tools like Temporal when it makes engineering sense, their core existence as a provider of infrastructure automation and security tools necessitates a deep, ongoing internal reliance. This self-referential development process, born out of necessity and a desire to solve their own infrastructure challenges, ultimately benefits the wider ecosystem of users who depend on HashiCorp to "do cloud right."