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> Today, the CTO of a company can spend engineering resources to build their search solution with Elasticsearch or buy speed with Algolia’s SaaS. I think OSS h

> Today, the CTO of a company can spend engineering resources to build their search solution with Elasticsearch or buy speed with Algolia’s SaaS. I think OSS has the long term advantage here. Everyone needs log storage and search. The combination of OSS and highly competitive IaaS will drive this part of the stack towards commodity pricing and little total cost of ownership (setup, and operations) It's already happening. Elasticsearch is quality software. You can provision an Elasticsearch cluster on AWS with a click of a button. You can also store all your logs in CloudWatch forever. This stack costs pennies to run compared to logging services like Splunk. Yes configuring it takes some time but an end state for this container generation is much less config. Now you own your logs and data and search. Not some SaaS vendor. Disclaimer. I'm working on an OSS platform, Convox, with the goal of helping the CTO get cost effective and reliable private infrastructure without big setup burdens and huge SaaS bills.

StavrosK 11y ago
I think it just depends on whether you can afford an ops person. If you have one, setting up your own stack makes financial sense, as it'll be cheaper. If you don't have enough ops to justify hiring one, then you might as well pay for the (more expensive per unit) SaaS offerings that will be cheaper purely because they're still only a few services.
- LamaOfRuin 11y ago
  That assumes the SaaS option doesn't also require some amount of ops. An assumption I wouldn't necessarily bet on when you start using SaaS from multiple providers to satisfy your various needs.
  - StavrosK 11y ago
    Sure, but SaaS generally require less ops. That's what you're paying for, in the end.
    - LamaOfRuin 11y ago
      That's what you're most often paying for now, but that's not a fundamental property of SaaS. It's a byproduct of the fact that most are built on open source products. If proprietary software companies like Oracle and Microsoft went purely SaaS for their business models (thinking of DB software here), you'd be paying just to get access to the software, in addition to any ops overhead benefits you also gained.
RodericDay 11y ago
Does Algolia have any particularly awesome client stories? https://www.algolia.com/customers https://www.algolia.com/customers The HackerNews search stands out to me as surprisingly weak in terms of intuitiveness, and oddly-branded to boot. A lot of their other clients seem to be hype-y startups. The customer-list for ElasticSearch seems a lot more robust and battle-tested: https://www.elastic.co/use-cases https://www.elastic.co/use-cases
- dustincoates 11y ago
  We have a ton of other awesome (from well-known) clients that are under NDA. Rest assured: we're working with fantastic people. :) Personally, I love our big clients, but one of the things I love most is that we provide a search that scales from concept on up. While a lot of the customers we've got listed on that page are start-ups, I think it's just as cool that Chrome Industries or Ritz use us for their search. I love that we're able to help these companies that I shop in "IRL" have awesome search without having to hire a specialist just for that.
jandrewrogers 11y ago
The big disadvantage of OSS versus (competent) infrastructure SaaS, is that open source software tends to have very poor operational efficiency. A major component of the infrastructure SaaS business model and defensibility is arbitraging the OpEx between open source and a properly designed SaaS implementation, primarily by radically reducing resource requirements to deliver a given level of scale and performance. The rule of thumb for most infrastructure SaaS like databases, big data platforms, etc is that you can get a 10x reduction in hardware requirements versus OSS, hence the OpEx/CapEx savings, with a well-engineered implementation of the same functionality. As someone in the business of doing exactly this, I can tell you that this is simple to achieve. OSS may be "free" but if it requires an order of magnitude more hardware to deliver the same performance and scale as my cloud implementation of the same thing, it makes the OSS much more expensive to the end user. This dynamic would go away if OSS infrastructure software was designed with performance and efficiency as a priority, but in practice that has been pretty far down the list of priorities for most popular OSS software. But I think most people are surprised by just how inefficient OSS software actually is compared to other implementations. I have been telling people for some time that without an increased focus on absolute performance and efficiency in OSS, it will be increasingly marginalized in usage because the CapEx/OpEx of deploying it is far too high compared to the alternatives.
- elsurudo 11y ago
  Could you provide some high-profile examples where the SaaS implementation is much more performant than the OSS variant? Genuinely curious... I figured the SaaS vendors (mostly) use OSS under-the-hood anyways, and then they have to take their overhead and profits, etc.
- manigandham 11y ago
  Arent most SaaS backed by the same open-source software? Often the part you're paying for is the management of the software, not the software itself.
- nzoschke 11y ago
  This is a really great perspective. You're totally right, SaaS companies have far more motivation to maximize performance and operations to reduce the cost of keeping their services running. OSS often doesn't have the need or the expertise to do this. But I do see some of this shifting... Some OSS projects are now built by folks that have lots of performance expertise and goals. There's also more funding or sponsorship for OSS development which will help. For example Redis is ridiculously cheap and easy to run on your own. antirez is a world class engineer with high standards and he has sponsorship to work towards his goals full time. AWS offers it as a service through ElasticCache which removes what challenges remain about configuration, replication or failover. So I wouldn't build, integrate or bet on a SaaS "cache" platform/company any more. It's been commoditized. I see signs of the same thing happening to more parts of the stack. ELK isn't the most performant log analysis platform, but it's close to Splunk in my experience, with the added benefit of the possibility of anyone, Elastic or the community, contributing performance improvements. Yes there is lots of wishful thinking here...

StavrosK 11y ago

I think it just depends on whether you can afford an ops person. If you have one, setting up your own stack makes financial sense, as it'll be cheaper. If you don't have enough ops to justify hiring one, then you might as well pay for the (more expensive per unit) SaaS offerings that will be cheaper purely because they're still only a few services.

LamaOfRuin 11y ago
That assumes the SaaS option doesn't also require some amount of ops. An assumption I wouldn't necessarily bet on when you start using SaaS from multiple providers to satisfy your various needs.
- StavrosK 11y ago
  Sure, but SaaS generally require less ops. That's what you're paying for, in the end.
  - LamaOfRuin 11y ago
    That's what you're most often paying for now, but that's not a fundamental property of SaaS. It's a byproduct of the fact that most are built on open source products. If proprietary software companies like Oracle and Microsoft went purely SaaS for their business models (thinking of DB software here), you'd be paying just to get access to the software, in addition to any ops overhead benefits you also gained.

RodericDay 11y ago

Does Algolia have any particularly awesome client stories? https://www.algolia.com/customers https://www.algolia.com/customers The HackerNews search stands out to me as surprisingly weak in terms of intuitiveness, and oddly-branded to boot. A lot of their other clients seem to be hype-y startups. The customer-list for ElasticSearch seems a lot more robust and battle-tested: https://www.elastic.co/use-cases https://www.elastic.co/use-cases

dustincoates 11y ago
We have a ton of other awesome (from well-known) clients that are under NDA. Rest assured: we're working with fantastic people. :) Personally, I love our big clients, but one of the things I love most is that we provide a search that scales from concept on up. While a lot of the customers we've got listed on that page are start-ups, I think it's just as cool that Chrome Industries or Ritz use us for their search. I love that we're able to help these companies that I shop in "IRL" have awesome search without having to hire a specialist just for that.

jandrewrogers 11y ago

The big disadvantage of OSS versus (competent) infrastructure SaaS, is that open source software tends to have very poor operational efficiency. A major component of the infrastructure SaaS business model and defensibility is arbitraging the OpEx between open source and a properly designed SaaS implementation, primarily by radically reducing resource requirements to deliver a given level of scale and performance. The rule of thumb for most infrastructure SaaS like databases, big data platforms, etc is that you can get a 10x reduction in hardware requirements versus OSS, hence the OpEx/CapEx savings, with a well-engineered implementation of the same functionality. As someone in the business of doing exactly this, I can tell you that this is simple to achieve. OSS may be "free" but if it requires an order of magnitude more hardware to deliver the same performance and scale as my cloud implementation of the same thing, it makes the OSS much more expensive to the end user. This dynamic would go away if OSS infrastructure software was designed with performance and efficiency as a priority, but in practice that has been pretty far down the list of priorities for most popular OSS software. But I think most people are surprised by just how inefficient OSS software actually is compared to other implementations. I have been telling people for some time that without an increased focus on absolute performance and efficiency in OSS, it will be increasingly marginalized in usage because the CapEx/OpEx of deploying it is far too high compared to the alternatives.

elsurudo 11y ago
Could you provide some high-profile examples where the SaaS implementation is much more performant than the OSS variant? Genuinely curious... I figured the SaaS vendors (mostly) use OSS under-the-hood anyways, and then they have to take their overhead and profits, etc.
manigandham 11y ago
Arent most SaaS backed by the same open-source software? Often the part you're paying for is the management of the software, not the software itself.
nzoschke 11y ago
This is a really great perspective. You're totally right, SaaS companies have far more motivation to maximize performance and operations to reduce the cost of keeping their services running. OSS often doesn't have the need or the expertise to do this. But I do see some of this shifting... Some OSS projects are now built by folks that have lots of performance expertise and goals. There's also more funding or sponsorship for OSS development which will help. For example Redis is ridiculously cheap and easy to run on your own. antirez is a world class engineer with high standards and he has sponsorship to work towards his goals full time. AWS offers it as a service through ElasticCache which removes what challenges remain about configuration, replication or failover. So I wouldn't build, integrate or bet on a SaaS "cache" platform/company any more. It's been commoditized. I see signs of the same thing happening to more parts of the stack. ELK isn't the most performant log analysis platform, but it's close to Splunk in my experience, with the added benefit of the possibility of anyone, Elastic or the community, contributing performance improvements. Yes there is lots of wishful thinking here...