What the cloud is Hashicorp: IBM makes $6.4 billion acquisition

We all know Big Blue but lesser known is Hashicorp. I can break things down for you on what Hashicorp actually does. I'll try to keep things as non technical as I can.

Starting off there is this thing called The Cloud, it's basically a bunch of computers a bit more beefier than your laptop all sitting in a room and talking to each other which pretty much makes up the internet.

The Cloud makes things easier than just running servers yourself for your brand new website or app as all the hard bits (physically obtaining servers and running cables) are more or less abstracted away from the developer. Even still, using The Cloud can get complex and very messy very fast. Imagine you have a high traffic website or web app with a lot of features and a lot of various components - to make sure you can manage all this you need some sort of software to help you out.

Here comes in Hashicorp - software that solves this Cloud problem for many large and small companies. Software such as Terraform (Telling The Cloud what type and how many of those servers you need) and Consul (One of the ways in how The Cloud can talk between other parts of the cloud) are just some of the products that Hashicorp makes.

Oh - and all this software is free and open source (sort of).