HashiCorp 2019 Year in Review

It’s a tradition for us to close out the year with some reflection on the progress we have made. As we mark the close of a significant year (the end of a decade—good-bye, 2010s), we note that it’s been an exciting year for HashiCorp with many appropriately significant milestones. This is all made possible by our passionate users, customers, partners, and employees who we’d like to thank deeply.

While we could highlight many milestones, here are a few that we’ve chosen:

Major Product Milestones. Across the entire HashiCorp portfolio we’ve announced major updates, including new products and services that each advance our goal to provision, secure, connect, and run any infrastructure for any application. We announced the fully managed HashiCorp Consul Service on Azure at HashiConf. Terraform Cloud expanded to add a free tier for up to 5 users to improve collaboration with Terraform. Alongside the cloud service, Terraform 0.12 finally shipped adding lots of new features and capabilities. Consul had several major releases, including 1.6 which added support for L7 traffic management and multi-data center networking. Consul 1.7 added enterprise support for namespaces and multi-tenancy. The latest release of Nomad (0.10) added native support for Consul service mesh capabilities, making it easy to secure a microservices architecture. Vault had three major releases, going from 1.0 to 1.3, and these included adding support for native storage and HA to remove any external dependencies. Packer 1.5 has added support for HCL2, while the previous release improves support for Windows and variable management. Vagrant continues to improve support for Docker and now has a CLI interface to Vagrant Cloud to make discovery even easier. There were thousands of new features and bug fixes this year, way more than we can summarize, but together all the tools have continued to mature and define the leading edge of infrastructure automation.

Growing OSS community. Building products that practitioners love has always been our focus, and this focus grows from the ethos of building tools we’d want to use ourselves. The downloads of the open source tools continue to grow rapidly, more users than ever attended our conferences, and participated in our HashiCorp User Groups (HUGs), with almost 30,000 members globally. We also held our first ever 24-hour virtual conference, or HashiTalks, with thousands of live viewers from around the world. The community continues to grow as users solve real problems and share their solutions with their peers.

Expanding our commercial footprint. We continue to make inroads with large enterprise customers, adding hundreds of new customers in the last year. We now count more than 100 of the Fortune 500 and over 200 of the Global 2000 among our commercial customers. These accomplishments are a testament to the expertise and dedication of our field teams and supporting functions that provide excellent prospect and customer experiences. HashiCorp products enable the world's largest businesses to adopt a cloud operating model, and this commercial success allows us to continue to invest in making our products better for everyone.

Partnering with the technology ecosystem, with a focus on cloud partners. As an infrastructure company, we have always valued our partnerships with the broader technology ecosystem. In particular, as our users and customers adopt public cloud infrastructure, it is important that we have strong partnerships with all the major cloud providers. This year we were honored to be the Microsoft Partner of the Year for Open Source Applications and Infrastructure on Azure, as well as the Google Cloud Technology Partner of the Year for the developer ecosystem. The broader HashiCorp Partner Network now includes 80+ technology partners and 200+ system integrators and resellers.

Growing from 350 to 800+ employees. We continue to grow organically driven by the demand of our users and customers adopting our products. To support the ever-growing community, we’ve added over 400 new people and 5 new countries in the last year from around the world. As we grow, it’s important for us to maintain our principles in our hiring, onboarding, and professional development practices. To support that effort, this year we hired our first director of engagement, inclusion, and diversity, Colleen Fukui-Sketchley.

Investing in Security. We built Vault originally as an internal tool to solve a security gap in how credentials were managed, and how sensitive customer data was stored. We open sourced that solution when we felt there was a broader need in the market, and Vault has continued to be hugely popular. As a company, we care deeply about security, and this year we hired Talha Tariq as our Chief Security Officer to build out a world-class security team. His team helps ensure our product release pipeline is secure, performs active threat modeling, and works closely with our product development teams to ensure we are designing secure systems, performing regular penetration testing, and improving our security incident triage and handling.

HashiConf EU and HashiConf Seattle. HashiConf is our large community and user conference, and we now run both an annual European and North American event. The European event was in Amsterdam, while the North American event was a homecoming of sorts in Seattle, where Mitchell and I first met and started working together. Both events were much bigger than in previous years, with over 1,600 people in attendance at HashiConf Seattle. The conferences allow us to bring our users, customers, partners, press, and analysts together and share best practices, production stories, and personal perspectives. We recapped HashiConf EU and HashiConf Seattle for those who missed it. Tickets are now available for 2020 for both HashiConf EU, and HashiConf US.

HashiCorp Named #4 on Forbes Cloud 100. In 2018 we were first named to the Forbes Cloud 100 list as the #32 company. In 2019 we were named #4 on the list, making HashiCorp the biggest mover in the top 5. We are honored to receive the recognition, and continue to look for ways to push the boundary on automation and cloud infrastructure.

It’s really amazing to see all the progress, and there are many more updates we could share.

As we enter 2020, it is exciting to see the energy around the company, the global community of users, customers, and partners, and the broad adoption of the products. We are looking forward to seeing what we can achieve in 2020 and beyond. Thank you all for being a part of our community!