HashiCorp runs low on staff, calls a halt to Terraform pull requests

A pause on community-submitted PRs

Updated Cloud darling HashiCorp has temporarily pulled up the drawbridge on community-submitted pull requests to its Terraform project, citing low staffing within the Terraform Core team.

The warning came at the end of the August and followed the publication by the company of a report warning of overspending in the cloud world.

But not, it seems, on staffing. At least not in the Terraform Cloud team where open positions have reached double figures. Cloud engineers, it seems, are very much in demand these days.

Terraform is a neat infrastructure as code tool and supports AWS, Azure, Google Cloud Platform and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure among others. Version 1.0 of the service arrived in General Availability form on 8 June with the multi-cloud world squarely in its sights.

HashiCorp boasted at the time of more than 100 million downloads as the version 1.0 milestone ticked over and took the time to thank those who had contributed to the project since it first emerged back in 2014. Reaching version 1.0 had product requirements that included it be "mature and stable," "deployed broadly," and have a "well-defined user experience."

Sadly, however, "having the resources to review community-submitted pull requests" does not appear to be one of the key requirements right now.

As for what has caused the low staffing, HashiCorp has remained tightlipped (we will update this piece should the company respond to our enquiry.) It has offices around the world, although its Terraform Cloud service (which uses Terraform) is looking for remote-based engineers mainly in the US, Canada and Australia. Not in the UK; handy, because there is every chance formerly well-paid techies are now pondering a career change to Heavy Goods Vehicle driver.

"We do hope to begin processing them again soon once we're back up to full staffing again, but for the moment we need to ask for patience. Thanks!" said the company of its pull request pause. ®

Updated at 07:41 UTC on 8 September to add:

The company wrote a blog post on the subject just hours after this article was published. Armon Dadgar, co-founder & CTO said in a statement: "Although we have many teams, some short-term staffing changes impacted our ability to review changes to Terraform Core in a timely manner. The intent behind the updated CONTRIBUTING.md file was to help set expectations for the potential contributors about when a response could be expected.

"The broader Terraform ecosystem is not impacted, and we are continuing to review a large number of contributions to our ecosystem of providers on a daily basis. In a few weeks, we expect to be back to normal across the board. We appreciate the understanding and patience of the community as we continue to grow and adjust our processes to support the community at scale."