As it happened with the other startups that were acquired by IBM, this too shall pass through the digestion system of the dinosaur and ejected out as a dump. Hashicorp products are showing the signs of a legacy thing already. IBM is the nursing home for these sort of aging stuff.
I'm a heavy user of Terraform and Vault products. Both do not belong to this era. Also worked for a startup acquired and dumped by IBM.
What are the modern equivalents? For Terraform I'd imagine it's Pulumi or OpenTofu but what is it for Vault? Last I checked OpenBao didn't seem to have much juice but it's been a minute since I did so. Or are there unrelated projects in this space that are on the same trajectory as Hashicorp was a decade ago?
Crossplane is excellent but you need to understand CRDs and kubectl at what I'd consider n intermediate level to really grok it whereas Terraform's CLI is almost fool-proof.
Relying on cloud key vaults is expensive and locks you in. Vault and Consul can run anywhere, even in your toaster. They also support those same KMS. Also, dead easy TUI and GUI with Vault Enterprise
What, in this era, replaces secrets handling in Kubernetes in a way thats easy for most devs to pick up?
What, in this era, replaces provisioning cloudy stuff that doesn't require heaps of YAML or a bootstrap Kubernetes cluster for operators to run within?
I'm a heavy user of Terraform and Vault products. Both do not belong to this era. Also worked for a startup acquired and dumped by IBM.