Reliability: It’s not great

Almost half of the issues are caused by their use of HashiCorp products.

As someone that has started tons of Consul clusters, analyzed tons of Terraform states, developed providers and wrote a HCL parser, I must say this:

HashiCorp built a brand of consistent design & docs, security, strict configuration, distributed-algos-made-approachable... but at its core, it's a very fragile ecosystem. The only benefit of HashiCorp headaches is that you will quickly learn Golang while reading some obscure github.com/hashicorp/blah/blah/file.go :)

We are asking to HashiCorp products to do things they were not designed to do, in configurations that they don't expect to be deployed in. Take a step back, and the idea of a single global namespace bound up with Raft consistency for a fleet deployed in dozens of regions, providing near-real-time state propagation, is just not at all reasonable. Our state propagation needs are much closer to those of a routing protocol than a distributed key-value database.

I have only positive things to say about every HashiCorp product I've worked with since I got here.

Well, why did you do that? If you’d asked them whether this was a supported configuration or intended purpose, they’d have said no; and anyone who had experience deploying Consul at large scale would have told you the same.

There is truly no compression algorithm for experience.

I don't think he personally designed the first implementation. But in any case, understanding of complex topics comes in waves.

Many times I've had to read all the docs then use a system for several months before the epiphany hits me.