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> They make more money selling PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, _Docker_, Linux, etc than the creators of those projects. It's not the only perspective, but it

by 015a 6y ago

> They make more money selling PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch, _Docker_, Linux, etc than the creators of those projects. It's not the only perspective, but it dominates for a reason. They make more money selling EC2, with this software installed on top of it. If Amazon did not sell RDS, their customers would buy EC2 instances and install it on there. Which of these realities would you prefer: 1. Mongo, ES, PG, etc have a cloud offering, which runs on metal they maintain. Naturally, the reliability and performance is worse. Amazon loses some money. Customers pay more for a worse product. 2. "Open source has failed, there's no way to monetize it", so we get DynamoDB and Aurora and S3. Amazon wins, Customers (mostly) win (unless Amazon takes the gun they've now loaded and decides to point it at them) 3. "Its open source, but you still have to buy it" lol ok, all the negatives of closed source with few of the positives of open source. No one wants the source code so they can read it and hack on it, they want it only as a signal for their ability to move hosting providers should they need to, or self-host. Source code usually lasts longer than the people who wrote it. 4. "We'll sell support packages" so now your revenue stream isn't aligned with customer success, because you're financially incentivized to build a product which needs support. Nope. 5. AWS does not have RDS, but does have EC2. Mongo, ES, PG, etc have their own "cloud" offerings, which are really just re-vendored EC2. They tack on a 30% upcharge so they can survive and develop the product. Well, that's what both ES and Mongo do, today. AWS loves this. They make the same amount of money from selling cheaper metal without all the expensive upkeep of RDS. Its the customers who hurt, not Amazon. You miss out on integration points in the cloud platform. You miss out on centralized IAM. You pay more for a worse product. People keep acting like AWS is a big bully who got big for no reason, it doesn't make sense, the cloud is a monopoly and AWS is strong-arming other companies to get bigger. Maybe to some small degree, but by far the reason why AWS is big is because They Build What Customers Want. End of story. There's no philosophical debate between AWS Product Development and their Customers concerning whether they should build an open source ES. There's just "Jeeze, Elastic has been really screwing us over lately, is there anything you can d--" "Say no more, we've got you, by the way your two hundred thousand dollar bill is due." "Wow, thanks Amazon, no problem we'll pay that right away." The real thing that's killing these database companies is that databases are a dime-a-dozen. You pick one, who cares which one it is. There's some minutia here and there, do you want SQL, NoSQL, time series, ok you get past that and the rest falls into place. I've sat in the decision making room on this for two or three companies. No one analyzes what the database can do. The discussions surround "where are we hosting it". What options does Azure have, AWS, oh that company has their own hosting platform, etc etc. HackerNews makes a big fuss about how MongoDB has no transactions; I've literally NEVER heard this brought up once as a negative against the product (though, sure, in some very specific industries or use-cases it matters). Version 4.whatever adds a new query operator; who gives a fuck, 99% of database usage is "write thing, read thing back, query for things in a way that SQL could do in 1992, update thing, delete thing." Databases are boring, and the success of the companies who tried to build billion dollar businesses on top of one (Oracle as well) reflects how boring the software actually is.

Pet_Ant 6y ago
I feel like [3] is the heart of the matter. The value is open-source to companies is that it commodifies support. Also software at an enterprise scale costs money. Not being held hostage allows you to switch support providers or go internal or fly blind. What these new quasi-open source (ie source available) companies want to do leverage their authorship of the software to be sole support service provider (of meaningful size)... which is exactly the sole value the enterprises extract from opensource: the lack of vendor leverage! The market does not tolerate a contradiction.
- 015a 6y ago
  Exactly. Companies like Mongo, ES, etc leveraged open source and venture capital to get where they are today, and now they're finding that open source isn't the business that venture capital wants it to be. I really don't know why they get so much defense in the community; I view their actions as a straight betrayal. The one thing you can say about AWS is, they're the enemy you know. They don't have a history of turning their back on OSS, but they also don't have a history of abusing OSS to gain traction for their product (though, the MySQL/Aurora relationship could reasonably fall under this. I think its different; not a betrayal because they haven't turned their backs on MySQL, but are just trying to make it better for their customers in ways MySQL alone can't do). With AWS, you know what you get; they care about the tech and the money; no politics (well, almost), no weird philosophies guiding decision making, just solving problems and getting paid to solve those problems. That's infrastructure, baby. Its a lot hazier with, say, MongoDB. You wouldn't believe the pressure they've put on customers on 3.6; we're talking weekly emails, even a few cold calls, from sales reps. "Hey, I know its the holidays, but have you taken a look at 4.0 yet? Let me send you a link to check it out, lots of cool stuff." Yeah; the real reason they want you to upgrade is because 4.0 has a bunch of new features that competitors like AWS can't replicate due to its new licensing. I'd love to hear from someone running MySQL on RDS, and if they've had a similar experience with AWS sales concerning Aurora; I suspect they haven't. Frankly, AWS never talks to us and we never talk to them, unless there's a problem or we want a discount, and they're always accommodating for both. The perfect relationship.

by 015a 6y ago

Pet_Ant 6y ago

I feel like [3] is the heart of the matter. The value is open-source to companies is that it commodifies support. Also software at an enterprise scale costs money. Not being held hostage allows you to switch support providers or go internal or fly blind. What these new quasi-open source (ie source available) companies want to do leverage their authorship of the software to be sole support service provider (of meaningful size)... which is exactly the sole value the enterprises extract from opensource: the lack of vendor leverage! The market does not tolerate a contradiction.

015a 6y ago
Exactly. Companies like Mongo, ES, etc leveraged open source and venture capital to get where they are today, and now they're finding that open source isn't the business that venture capital wants it to be. I really don't know why they get so much defense in the community; I view their actions as a straight betrayal. The one thing you can say about AWS is, they're the enemy you know. They don't have a history of turning their back on OSS, but they also don't have a history of abusing OSS to gain traction for their product (though, the MySQL/Aurora relationship could reasonably fall under this. I think its different; not a betrayal because they haven't turned their backs on MySQL, but are just trying to make it better for their customers in ways MySQL alone can't do). With AWS, you know what you get; they care about the tech and the money; no politics (well, almost), no weird philosophies guiding decision making, just solving problems and getting paid to solve those problems. That's infrastructure, baby. Its a lot hazier with, say, MongoDB. You wouldn't believe the pressure they've put on customers on 3.6; we're talking weekly emails, even a few cold calls, from sales reps. "Hey, I know its the holidays, but have you taken a look at 4.0 yet? Let me send you a link to check it out, lots of cool stuff." Yeah; the real reason they want you to upgrade is because 4.0 has a bunch of new features that competitors like AWS can't replicate due to its new licensing. I'd love to hear from someone running MySQL on RDS, and if they've had a similar experience with AWS sales concerning Aurora; I suspect they haven't. Frankly, AWS never talks to us and we never talk to them, unless there's a problem or we want a discount, and they're always accommodating for both. The perfect relationship.