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This is not the best way to compete with Amazon. The believe that their feature set is enough of a differentiator is probably delusional. CockroachDB does "mass
by DVassallo 7y ago
This is not the best way to compete with Amazon. The believe that their feature set is enough of a differentiator is probably delusional. CockroachDB does "massive scale SQL without manual shading". BSL won't hinder Amazon offering those features too.
If CockroachDB remained OSS, there would have been a chance of Amazon offering Elastic CockroachDB eventually, and at least make the Cockroach brand more popular. But now it will likely be an Aurora feature.
If you want to compete with Amazon, do something Amazon cannot do.
- api 7y ago> If you want to compete with Amazon, do something Amazon cannot do. ... run it somewhere other than Amazon?
- DVassallo 7y agolol. True, but not much to differentiate on that unfortunately, unless they're able to point out something fundamentally wrong with the Amazon platform.
- lacker 7y agoThe believe that their feature set is enough of a differentiator is probably delusional. If their feature set isn't a good differentiator from other databases, then their company isn't going to succeed in any situation. This strategy is CockroachDB doing something that Amazon cannot do.
- DVassallo 7y agoI estimate the odds that AWS Aurora will offer "massive scale SQL without manual shading" in the next 3 years to be >95%. Then why would anyone want to to use Cockroach? They need to differentiate on something else. Ideally something that Amazon is unwilling to do, or would find very hard to do.
- espadrine 7y agoAmazon may be unwilling or unable to be multi-cloud. Companies worried about being stuck in a silo may think twice if they have a more convenient option. Besides, crdb does worldwide SQL databases now, and the only competitor at that level is not Aurora, it is Google Cloud Spanner, at a much higher price range and with very limited options.
- senderista 7y agoAmazon is generally averse to multi-region integration for reasons of fault-tolerance, so I doubt they are going to offer a fully geo-distributed DB any time soon.
- lmeyerov 7y agoThe #2+ cloud vendors are hungry for marketshare, so they're showing signs of multi-cloud already (and already global). A bit reductive, but CRDB is now in an arbitrage game: will Google/MS/IBM/Oracle/Baidu/... pay $200M-$1B to buy them ($50M is a lot on the cap table), or they somehow pull off a rev share similar to "Azure Databricks" that they can bail before it goes to zero / find something more differentiating long-term. Once every top infra team at MS & Google realized they can be a saas/paaas revenue center, not just saving 1% in internal costs, that made the whole "Google for everyone else" VC funding wave feel like musical chairs. It does feel like a good ("least bad") move given the environment. We have taken an "embrace" approach to using/contributing to OSS and assuming commoditization of database+compute tech (Apache Arrow, Nvidia RAPIDS, ...). We've wanted to further open most of our code, not just those libs, so we're not the only ones writing funny distributed GPU webapp+etl stuff... but couldn't find a way that made sense so far. So, I've been watching with great interest, and good luck to the teams involved!
- FactolSarin 7y ago>If you want to compete with Amazon, do something Amazon cannot do. That doesn't sound like competing
- DVassallo 7y agoSure is. I didn't mean a product that Amazon can't do, but other factors that Amazon would likely be unwilling to do or find very hard to do. For example, offering high-touch support, or having a great UI... Or being an open source champion! Lots of things that Amazon is likely incapable of doing in the near future.