5 ms·

Have you heard of Amazon Elasticsearch Service, launched in 2015? Elastic is doing fine.

scarface74 8y ago
Elastic Co isn’t profitable by definition it isn’t “doing fine”. From their SEC filing: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1707753/000119312518266861/d588632ds1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1707753/000119312518... We have a history of losses and may not be able to achieve profitability or positive cash flows on a consistent basis. If we cannot achieve profitability or positive cash flows, our business, financial condition, and results of operations may suffer.
- alittletooraph 8y ago
  You're right they're not profitable — and neither is MongoDB — but the point is that AWS launched an Elasticsearch service 3 years prior to Elastic having a very successful IPO supported by stellar metrics (also found in the SEC filing you linked). So the statements made at the beginning of this thread are probably a bit premature.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    Only in tech do people think that a money losing company is “successful” because they were able to convince investors to buy stock instead of defining success as having a business model where income is greater than expenses. In reality long term profitability is the only metric that matters for a corporation
    - privateSFacct 8y ago
      And in contrast to these startups with their "success" AWS is printing cash for amazon which releases surprisingly few "metrics" beyond $ in and $ out.
      - scarface74 8y ago
        And at the end of the day. What else matters when measuring whether a profit seeking corporation is successful?
- zwily 8y ago
  Literally every S1 filing will have some sort of language like that. They are required to list the risks that may harm them.
  - scarface74 8y ago
    They haven’t shown a profit yet. So you don’t have any proof that they have a sustainable business model.
spectre256 8y ago
This is hopefully a good counterexample. Amazon's Elasticsearch Service is pretty bad (poor general performance, very slow to make cluster changes/launch new clusters, etc). But I can't help but think Amazon can and would easily fix those things if they mattered. Amazon's hosted Elasticsearch is a lot cheaper than Elastic's, and I'll bet that's enough to get people to use it.
- ignoramous 8y ago
  > poor general performance By poor performance, I assume you mean IO? AWS Elasticsearch has supported i3 instance type (nvme on-instance storage) for well over a year now [0]. Additionally, you could enable slow-logs to catch perf issues yourself [1] > very slow to make cluster changes Scale-out and access-policy changes happen in-place now and so happen much faster than they used to be. > launch new clusters In my experience, it depends on the cluster size, but usually, I see cluster being up in 20m. That's nice given that it sets up pretty much everything (spin up instances, apply access policies, run health checks, enable cloudwatch monitoring, snapshots, create route53 records, integrate with cognito, enc-at-rest via KMS, spin up load balancers, setup vpc resources etc) on my behalf. [0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/latest/developerguide/aes-supported-instance-types.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/latest/dev... [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/analyzing-amazon-elasticsearch-service-slow-logs-using-amazon-cloudwatch-logs-streaming-and-kibana/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/analyzing-amazon-elast...
  - spectre256 8y ago
    Actually not IO performance, but mostly CPU. Last time I tested (which admittedly was about a year ago), an AWS ES cluster was about 20% slower than a self-made cluster with the same instance types. Given that AWS ES clusters still cannot use C5 instances, which offer FAR better cost/$, the performance disparity today might be even larger. I can also launch an Elasticsearch cluster myself in about 2 minutes via terraform, so 20 minutes is not super impressive. That said I recognize Elasticsearch is actually quite a finicky beast to set up, and my setup only has to deal with the needs I have, and probably would be set up horribly for certain other people. I can see how a hosted system that has to deal with all the weird edge-cases of a few thousand customers would take longer to set things up.

Elastic Co isn’t profitable by definition it isn’t “doing fine”. From their SEC filing: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1707753/000119312518266861/d588632ds1.htm https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1707753/000119312518... We have a history of losses and may not be able to achieve profitability or positive cash flows on a consistent basis. If we cannot achieve profitability or positive cash flows, our business, financial condition, and results of operations may suffer.

alittletooraph 8y ago
You're right they're not profitable — and neither is MongoDB — but the point is that AWS launched an Elasticsearch service 3 years prior to Elastic having a very successful IPO supported by stellar metrics (also found in the SEC filing you linked). So the statements made at the beginning of this thread are probably a bit premature.
- scarface74 8y ago
  Only in tech do people think that a money losing company is “successful” because they were able to convince investors to buy stock instead of defining success as having a business model where income is greater than expenses. In reality long term profitability is the only metric that matters for a corporation
  - privateSFacct 8y ago
    And in contrast to these startups with their "success" AWS is printing cash for amazon which releases surprisingly few "metrics" beyond $ in and $ out.
    - scarface74 8y ago
      And at the end of the day. What else matters when measuring whether a profit seeking corporation is successful?
zwily 8y ago
Literally every S1 filing will have some sort of language like that. They are required to list the risks that may harm them.
- scarface74 8y ago
  They haven’t shown a profit yet. So you don’t have any proof that they have a sustainable business model.

spectre256 8y ago

This is hopefully a good counterexample. Amazon's Elasticsearch Service is pretty bad (poor general performance, very slow to make cluster changes/launch new clusters, etc). But I can't help but think Amazon can and would easily fix those things if they mattered. Amazon's hosted Elasticsearch is a lot cheaper than Elastic's, and I'll bet that's enough to get people to use it.

ignoramous 8y ago
> poor general performance By poor performance, I assume you mean IO? AWS Elasticsearch has supported i3 instance type (nvme on-instance storage) for well over a year now [0]. Additionally, you could enable slow-logs to catch perf issues yourself [1] > very slow to make cluster changes Scale-out and access-policy changes happen in-place now and so happen much faster than they used to be. > launch new clusters In my experience, it depends on the cluster size, but usually, I see cluster being up in 20m. That's nice given that it sets up pretty much everything (spin up instances, apply access policies, run health checks, enable cloudwatch monitoring, snapshots, create route53 records, integrate with cognito, enc-at-rest via KMS, spin up load balancers, setup vpc resources etc) on my behalf. [0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/latest/developerguide/aes-supported-instance-types.html https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/latest/dev... [1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/analyzing-amazon-elasticsearch-service-slow-logs-using-amazon-cloudwatch-logs-streaming-and-kibana/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/analyzing-amazon-elast...
- spectre256 8y ago
  Actually not IO performance, but mostly CPU. Last time I tested (which admittedly was about a year ago), an AWS ES cluster was about 20% slower than a self-made cluster with the same instance types. Given that AWS ES clusters still cannot use C5 instances, which offer FAR better cost/$, the performance disparity today might be even larger. I can also launch an Elasticsearch cluster myself in about 2 minutes via terraform, so 20 minutes is not super impressive. That said I recognize Elasticsearch is actually quite a finicky beast to set up, and my setup only has to deal with the needs I have, and probably would be set up horribly for certain other people. I can see how a hosted system that has to deal with all the weird edge-cases of a few thousand customers would take longer to set things up.