This seemed like an inevitability given the reliance on enterprise customers and the move to maximise the revenue from Terraform with the recent license change. They have made a round of layoffs, so at least some cost saving has already been done to make it more appealing for a sale. The main challenge from an acquisition like this will be maintaining the community around terraform providers, if that drops off, i'm not sure there will be as many developers coming into the hashicorp ecosystem.
Last year while working in a nix using team, Golang was lagging behind on nix by a few months, I wanted to use a new feature from the latest version and it lead to some awkward conversations. Nix is not a drop in replacement for homebrew, nor is it fast when it comes to community updates. If you have a small number of packages it works well, but if you only use a few number of packages, why do you need a heavy package manager.
I see a lot of these data providers investing in chat style interfaces too, the main plus with aws is all the extra data a Confluence chat interface won’t have for example. Not sure how you reconcile inconsistent data from say slack and confluence. If they get it right though, this will be the top of the stack for AI for a lot of companies
One takeaway I found from my experience, using a combination of linkedin and ycombinator co-founder match is just how many non-technical think you are going to be an employee. One meeting was basically 10 minutes of me pitching my idea, then 20 minutes of them asking if I was interested in contract work on an idea that was a year in with no progress. One guy was even like, "look, i need a coder, I can pay you x", not a great way to end a co-founder date.