9 ms·

Amazon Managed Service for Grafana

204 points by ahachete 6y ago

edumucelli 6y ago
How is that to generate the same kind of situation as the one we have seen regarding MongoDB, I mean, "giving the middle finger to open source" [1]? I know one relates to API compatibility, but those companies never end to surprise me. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/aws-gives-open-source-the-middle-finger/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/aws-gives-open-source-the-...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- justicezyx 6y ago
  This is a middle finger to open source the business model. This is a thumb up for open source the development model. IMHO I will be more worried that a good piece of open source software is only commercialized by one company, by all accounts, that leaves a lot of risks unaddressed. Lastly, to anyone claim that this hurts their feeling, I cannot help feel very surprised that one with some ideas of the business cycle and Amazon's (or any big corporations) track record, would not anticipate this. Personally, I am surprised that AWS have not started this in 2014, I guess they have been so successful that they probably cannot hire fast enough to get started.
- rubiquity 6y ago
  Disclaimer: I work at AWS but not on anything related to this. I don't think this announcement is as juicy or controversial as you were hoping. It appears this was developed jointly with Grafana Labs as a part of a longer term partnership: https://grafana.com/blog/2020/12/15/announcing-amazon-managed-service-for-grafana/ https://grafana.com/blog/2020/12/15/announcing-amazon-manage...
luhn 6y ago
> With one click, upgrade to Grafana Enterprise, giving you access to a wide variety of third-party ISV plugins – AppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Oracle Database, ServiceNow, Splunk, Wavefront, Snowflake, and MongoDB. You can also access consultation, support, and on-demand training content directly from Grafana Labs. It's nice to see that AWS partnered with Grafana Labs on this. Both companies stand to benefit, and the success of Grafana Labs helps ensure the long-term success of Grafana. Here's the Grafana Labs press release: https://grafana.com/blog/2020/12/15/announcing-amazon-managed-service-for-grafana/?pg=hp&plcmt=hero-btn1 https://grafana.com/blog/2020/12/15/announcing-amazon-manage...
- tempest_ 6y ago
  Assuming they didnt make them an offer they couldn't refuse. You know, work with us or we'll OpenDistro you.
  - Spivak 6y ago
    This is how software is supposed to work. If your enterprise value-add can be replicated by a two pizza team and that team is cheaper than your licensing fees then it's barely even a question as to whether it's worth it. We do this all the time on a smaller scale at our company to avoid license fees. We need one small feature from the enterprise offering so we implement it ourselves to say with the free oss/community version.
    - judge2020 6y ago
      Except that Amazon isn't "a two pizza team", it's a 1.5 trillion dollar company that could replicate any startup ever with 6-12 months and a hundred engineers.
      - Spivak 6y ago
        I think in the business world this would be called "not having a moat." There's basically only one to proceed if your product can be semi-trivially copied by someone throwing money at the problem. You have to sell it to them for less than it would cost to build in-house. Sure they could throw money at the problem but they won't when it's cheaper to just buy it.
        manigandham 6y ago
        When you have that much money, moats don't matter.
        treeman79 6y ago
        Code commit. It is so horrible compared to GitHub.
pachico 6y ago
I must say it's quite an expensive jump for a medium size company (50-100 users) given Grafana requires very little maintenance and runs smoothly in low budget instances
- bluedino 6y ago
  But it looks cool.
- pageandrew 6y ago
  Right. Grafana is a low maintenance application to run -- its just a web interface in front of various databases. More interesting is managed Prometheus, which it looks like they've also announced today.
- frompdx 6y ago
  I agree, I have used Grafana for a few years and it requires very little effort. However, the dashboards I use are static and I don't back it with a RDBMS because of this. I suppose there is more value for users who plan to have more complicated configurations or want to give others the ability to build ad-hoc dashboards.
sciurus 6y ago
> An Amazon Managed Service for Grafana Editor license costs $9 per active user per workspace... For customers who need only view access, an Amazon Managed Service for Grafana Viewer license costs $5 per active user per workspace Yikes. Per-user pricing is tough for data visualization tools, since the audience for a dashboard could be really broad.
- arpinum 6y ago
  QuickSight and Tableau are also per-user pricing, seems to be the norm.
  - redis_mlc 6y ago
    At companies I've worked at, Tableau ($x00,000 per company) is limited to save cost by: 1) internal users are limited to the "chosen ones" and 2) often HA is sacriiced to cut the server licensing costs in half. ie. the product champion "forgot" to add the HA hosts because cost optics. Oh, and the product champion always says, "It's for offline reporting, it will never be connected to the homepage/admin page." Me a week later: "What's this fancy USA map on the admin page?"
- markcartertm 6y ago
  Can you share more detail? in this pricing model, you only pay if you use the service in the last 30 days. for a company with 100 engineers most of which don't author dashboards this will be a few hundred USD a month for HA, Security, Ptaching, scaling - IMHO self managed engineering time will cost more
  - nrmitchi 6y ago
    HA on Grafana isn't that difficult. The majority of Grafana is browser-side rendered data of queries which are just passed through Grafana to the data source. It's fairly light weight. Security wise, as far as I know AWS isn't offering anything additional here. The argument of "but you're paying to not have to worry about it!" that is a fair argument. But comments like this seem to purposely over-state the difficulty of running a not-super-complicated tool like Grafana in order to make "only $600/month, or $7.2k/year", sound more appealing.
nrmitchi 6y ago
This feels like a new level of gross for Amazon in terms of their previous "this open-source thing is mine now" strategy. Not only is this taking-and-running an open source project, but on top of that, the pricing is per user? This feels like a step beyond "hosting software for you", and towards "building a business with someone else's product" I see that this is in partnership with Grafana Labs, which I guess is a good thing, but I can't comprehend why Grafana would have gone along with this (short of some sort of "well we're doing it either way" threat from Amazon). I don't see anything new here that Amazon is providing on top of what Grafana Labs already did. What am I missing?
- wmf 6y ago
  What if some of that pricing is passing though to Grafana Labs?
  - nrmitchi 6y ago
    Do you have some special knowledge from a different source that indicates this would be the case? If not you're just speculating that Amazon is acting in an very un-historical-Amazon way.
    - jimn 6y ago
      https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/how-aws-and-grafana-labs-are-collaborating-to-improve-grafana-for-all/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/how-aws-and-grafana-... Down in the Conclusion section at the bottom: "AWS, working with Grafana Labs, will be contributing licensing revenue and code to help make Grafana even better, not just for the AWS service, but also for open source users and Grafana Cloud customers."
      - nrmitchi 6y ago
        Well that is good then. The initial content that I had read indicated that it was Grafana Enterprise licences that would be contributed back. This is a new step for Amazon, which is good. In this case this feels closer to a first-party AWS Marketplace app for Grafana.
fnord77 6y ago
inhouse we use a few different data viz tools and Grafana is in my opinion subpar.
- luto 6y ago
  Which of the other data viz tools do you like more?
- rad_gruchalski 6y ago
  And what do you recommend?
afandian 6y ago
If I want to create completely open-data workspaces, does that mean I need a $5 per viewer license for everyone that accesses it? Or would it not be possible to allow public read-only access? Something like this: https://grafana.wikimedia.org/ https://grafana.wikimedia.org/
siscia 6y ago
In my understanding, AWS is selling the service and the hosting while Grafana is selling the software. AWS is the distributore of the software and it is paying a reasonable fee to Grafana. IF this is the case, this is a HUGE step forward for OSS. It is a clear and simple way for OS to monetize software, while AWS keep focusing on what it does best, operations. This ensure long term sustainability of software and hefty profit margin for the operators. Win-Win!
- shostack 6y ago
  Does that not risk Amazon becoming an "app store" for OSS and wielding quite a bit of influence over it?
  - zhengyi13 6y ago
    I don't think Amazon would mind being in that position. Realistically though, with 3 major cloud vendors to choose from, I don't think the danger of app-store style control holds in the same way.
  - harpratap 6y ago
    Even if it does, I don't see how they can lock them in just their version of "app store". If it takes off, I can see GCP, Azure and others offering similar deals too.
  - setr 6y ago
    The App Store is fundamentally a problem because there exists only one (eg apple) or one is inherently privileged (eg android); on a PC/servers/cloud, this isn’t likely to ever occur. Although, I suppose steam is an argument to the alternative, though they haven’t successfully abused their position afaik (like their attempt to monetize general modding communities across non-valve games)
- hn_asker 6y ago
  My hope is that major cloud providers standardize the price around these collaborations with open source. If Azure and GCP did the same thing, why pay them differently?
turdnagel 6y ago
Does anybody know if the managed Grafana will live within a VPC? Would love to be able to query resources without public IPs using this service.
cactus2093 6y ago
What would be the drop-in metrics store on AWS to use alongside Grafana? I wasn't aware of an infludb/prometheus/etc type data store on AWS. Edit: ha, nevermind I see they just released AWS Prometheus today as well.
may4m 6y ago
so amazon is waiting for open source projects to mature and large have adoption so they can easily sell them to their existing enterprise customers. A lot of open source projects like tensorflow, kubernetes (which amazon is making millions from) where contribution from google's years development and RD. I know amazon keeps saying they're contributing to open source but it's easier to contribute when you're already getting revenue from that product

204 points by ahachete 6y ago

How is that to generate the same kind of situation as the one we have seen regarding MongoDB, I mean, "giving the middle finger to open source" [1]? I know one relates to API compatibility, but those companies never end to surprise me. [1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/aws-gives-open-source-the-middle-finger/ https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/aws-gives-open-source-the-...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
justicezyx 6y ago
This is a middle finger to open source the business model. This is a thumb up for open source the development model. IMHO I will be more worried that a good piece of open source software is only commercialized by one company, by all accounts, that leaves a lot of risks unaddressed. Lastly, to anyone claim that this hurts their feeling, I cannot help feel very surprised that one with some ideas of the business cycle and Amazon's (or any big corporations) track record, would not anticipate this. Personally, I am surprised that AWS have not started this in 2014, I guess they have been so successful that they probably cannot hire fast enough to get started.
rubiquity 6y ago
Disclaimer: I work at AWS but not on anything related to this. I don't think this announcement is as juicy or controversial as you were hoping. It appears this was developed jointly with Grafana Labs as a part of a longer term partnership: https://grafana.com/blog/2020/12/15/announcing-amazon-managed-service-for-grafana/ https://grafana.com/blog/2020/12/15/announcing-amazon-manage...

luhn 6y ago

> With one click, upgrade to Grafana Enterprise, giving you access to a wide variety of third-party ISV plugins – AppDynamics, Datadog, Dynatrace, New Relic, Oracle Database, ServiceNow, Splunk, Wavefront, Snowflake, and MongoDB. You can also access consultation, support, and on-demand training content directly from Grafana Labs. It's nice to see that AWS partnered with Grafana Labs on this. Both companies stand to benefit, and the success of Grafana Labs helps ensure the long-term success of Grafana. Here's the Grafana Labs press release: https://grafana.com/blog/2020/12/15/announcing-amazon-managed-service-for-grafana/?pg=hp&plcmt=hero-btn1 https://grafana.com/blog/2020/12/15/announcing-amazon-manage...

tempest_ 6y ago
Assuming they didnt make them an offer they couldn't refuse. You know, work with us or we'll OpenDistro you.
- Spivak 6y ago
  This is how software is supposed to work. If your enterprise value-add can be replicated by a two pizza team and that team is cheaper than your licensing fees then it's barely even a question as to whether it's worth it. We do this all the time on a smaller scale at our company to avoid license fees. We need one small feature from the enterprise offering so we implement it ourselves to say with the free oss/community version.
  - judge2020 6y ago
    Except that Amazon isn't "a two pizza team", it's a 1.5 trillion dollar company that could replicate any startup ever with 6-12 months and a hundred engineers.
    - Spivak 6y ago
      I think in the business world this would be called "not having a moat." There's basically only one to proceed if your product can be semi-trivially copied by someone throwing money at the problem. You have to sell it to them for less than it would cost to build in-house. Sure they could throw money at the problem but they won't when it's cheaper to just buy it.
      - manigandham 6y ago
        When you have that much money, moats don't matter.
        treeman79 6y ago
        Code commit. It is so horrible compared to GitHub.

pachico 6y ago

I must say it's quite an expensive jump for a medium size company (50-100 users) given Grafana requires very little maintenance and runs smoothly in low budget instances

bluedino 6y ago
But it looks cool.
pageandrew 6y ago
Right. Grafana is a low maintenance application to run -- its just a web interface in front of various databases. More interesting is managed Prometheus, which it looks like they've also announced today.
frompdx 6y ago
I agree, I have used Grafana for a few years and it requires very little effort. However, the dashboards I use are static and I don't back it with a RDBMS because of this. I suppose there is more value for users who plan to have more complicated configurations or want to give others the ability to build ad-hoc dashboards.

sciurus 6y ago

> An Amazon Managed Service for Grafana Editor license costs $9 per active user per workspace... For customers who need only view access, an Amazon Managed Service for Grafana Viewer license costs $5 per active user per workspace Yikes. Per-user pricing is tough for data visualization tools, since the audience for a dashboard could be really broad.

arpinum 6y ago
QuickSight and Tableau are also per-user pricing, seems to be the norm.
- redis_mlc 6y ago
  At companies I've worked at, Tableau ($x00,000 per company) is limited to save cost by: 1) internal users are limited to the "chosen ones" and 2) often HA is sacriiced to cut the server licensing costs in half. ie. the product champion "forgot" to add the HA hosts because cost optics. Oh, and the product champion always says, "It's for offline reporting, it will never be connected to the homepage/admin page." Me a week later: "What's this fancy USA map on the admin page?"
markcartertm 6y ago
Can you share more detail? in this pricing model, you only pay if you use the service in the last 30 days. for a company with 100 engineers most of which don't author dashboards this will be a few hundred USD a month for HA, Security, Ptaching, scaling - IMHO self managed engineering time will cost more
- nrmitchi 6y ago
  HA on Grafana isn't that difficult. The majority of Grafana is browser-side rendered data of queries which are just passed through Grafana to the data source. It's fairly light weight. Security wise, as far as I know AWS isn't offering anything additional here. The argument of "but you're paying to not have to worry about it!" that is a fair argument. But comments like this seem to purposely over-state the difficulty of running a not-super-complicated tool like Grafana in order to make "only $600/month, or $7.2k/year", sound more appealing.

nrmitchi 6y ago

This feels like a new level of gross for Amazon in terms of their previous "this open-source thing is mine now" strategy. Not only is this taking-and-running an open source project, but on top of that, the pricing is per user? This feels like a step beyond "hosting software for you", and towards "building a business with someone else's product" I see that this is in partnership with Grafana Labs, which I guess is a good thing, but I can't comprehend why Grafana would have gone along with this (short of some sort of "well we're doing it either way" threat from Amazon). I don't see anything new here that Amazon is providing on top of what Grafana Labs already did. What am I missing?

wmf 6y ago
What if some of that pricing is passing though to Grafana Labs?
- nrmitchi 6y ago
  Do you have some special knowledge from a different source that indicates this would be the case? If not you're just speculating that Amazon is acting in an very un-historical-Amazon way.
  - jimn 6y ago
    https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/how-aws-and-grafana-labs-are-collaborating-to-improve-grafana-for-all/ https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/how-aws-and-grafana-... Down in the Conclusion section at the bottom: "AWS, working with Grafana Labs, will be contributing licensing revenue and code to help make Grafana even better, not just for the AWS service, but also for open source users and Grafana Cloud customers."
    - nrmitchi 6y ago
      Well that is good then. The initial content that I had read indicated that it was Grafana Enterprise licences that would be contributed back. This is a new step for Amazon, which is good. In this case this feels closer to a first-party AWS Marketplace app for Grafana.

fnord77 6y ago

inhouse we use a few different data viz tools and Grafana is in my opinion subpar.

luto 6y ago
Which of the other data viz tools do you like more?
rad_gruchalski 6y ago
And what do you recommend?

afandian 6y ago

If I want to create completely open-data workspaces, does that mean I need a $5 per viewer license for everyone that accesses it? Or would it not be possible to allow public read-only access? Something like this: https://grafana.wikimedia.org/ https://grafana.wikimedia.org/

siscia 6y ago

In my understanding, AWS is selling the service and the hosting while Grafana is selling the software. AWS is the distributore of the software and it is paying a reasonable fee to Grafana. IF this is the case, this is a HUGE step forward for OSS. It is a clear and simple way for OS to monetize software, while AWS keep focusing on what it does best, operations. This ensure long term sustainability of software and hefty profit margin for the operators. Win-Win!

shostack 6y ago
Does that not risk Amazon becoming an "app store" for OSS and wielding quite a bit of influence over it?
- zhengyi13 6y ago
  I don't think Amazon would mind being in that position. Realistically though, with 3 major cloud vendors to choose from, I don't think the danger of app-store style control holds in the same way.
- harpratap 6y ago
  Even if it does, I don't see how they can lock them in just their version of "app store". If it takes off, I can see GCP, Azure and others offering similar deals too.
- setr 6y ago
  The App Store is fundamentally a problem because there exists only one (eg apple) or one is inherently privileged (eg android); on a PC/servers/cloud, this isn’t likely to ever occur. Although, I suppose steam is an argument to the alternative, though they haven’t successfully abused their position afaik (like their attempt to monetize general modding communities across non-valve games)
hn_asker 6y ago
My hope is that major cloud providers standardize the price around these collaborations with open source. If Azure and GCP did the same thing, why pay them differently?

turdnagel 6y ago

Does anybody know if the managed Grafana will live within a VPC? Would love to be able to query resources without public IPs using this service.

cactus2093 6y ago

What would be the drop-in metrics store on AWS to use alongside Grafana? I wasn't aware of an infludb/prometheus/etc type data store on AWS. Edit: ha, nevermind I see they just released AWS Prometheus today as well.

may4m 6y ago

so amazon is waiting for open source projects to mature and large have adoption so they can easily sell them to their existing enterprise customers. A lot of open source projects like tensorflow, kubernetes (which amazon is making millions from) where contribution from google's years development and RD. I know amazon keeps saying they're contributing to open source but it's easier to contribute when you're already getting revenue from that product