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

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...