2 ms·

self-hosting solves the saas dependency part, which is great! saas should be a value add, not a req. Proprietary & closed source means risk sign-offs and havin

self-hosting solves the saas dependency part, which is great! saas should be a value add, not a req. Proprietary & closed source means risk sign-offs and having to work w an extra party for sign-offs, so unattractive. I'm not sure an auth dependency merits that. (And nowadays, a negative signal for security...) re:business model... I don't know VC-scale ($1-10B/yr), but not every infra project has to immediately turn into a 10K employee company. That's someone putting their global domination ambition over their users, so a sniff test for me on a co's management. Maybe there is a way to do it, and imo, a $50M/yr co here is totally doable, a fine achievement, and can be used to figure out Product 2. As an infra user, esp with our own users having us make high-trust decisions for things they don't really understand, I prefer adding dependencies to projects I don't think will do a quick flip / flameout / sell me out / etc.

mooreds 6y ago
Thanks, definitely appreciate the perspective and thoughtful answers. I don't think that worries about a cloud provider eating the lunch a company has set (to get metaphorical on you) is solely limited to VC funded companies, but I do appreciate they're more likely to worry (see ElasticSearch, of course). > but not every infra project has to immediately turn into a 10K employee company. Couldn't agree more! Cheers!
- lmeyerov 6y ago
  Also, I'm not sure I buy the concern about aws & friends in this space for a few reasons: -- Now that SaaS for identity is established, the natural next step is OSS versions that come with SaaS, so if you're starting fresh and know that's coming... it seems short-sighted to start without that -- aws & friends have their own identity products, so given the already-commoditized market, they're unlikely to want to be pushing your n+1 one OSS seems more like a growth driver here than a risk b/c of the competitive market, though I can see that being unsettling to traditional business/VC types who are out of touch with the market. What the value-add for a managed layer is seems like "a lot possible", e.g., scale, support, multi-cloud, so I'd expect customers to pull you pretty quick if they didn't already. In our case, quite explicitly, we're evaluating a path where on-prem single-tenant users can bundle & self-serve something (SSO/LDAP/...), while for our saas tier, we can hook into something normal by aws/azure/someone else. Lack of full-featured OSS (w/ no SaaS necessary) for on-prem, or at least a clear way to let us transparently swap something like Keycloak for those folks, is an instant no.
  - mooreds 6y ago
    Good points about AWS, though I will say that AWS has multiple different document databases and caching engines, so if there was customer demand, I don't doubt that they would run a different identity service. I have not used it, but from what I've seen, Cognito doesn't seem to get much love. > OSS seems more like a growth driver here than a risk b/c of the competitive market, though I can see that being unsettling to traditional business/VC types who are out of touch with the market. I hope you weren't talking about me :) . We'll see, I certainly some funded auth startups going the open core/OSS route (SuperTokens, Clerky, WorkOS). > In our case, quite explicitly, we're evaluating a path where on-prem single-tenant users can bundle & self-serve something (SSO/LDAP/...), while for our saas tier, we can hook into something normal by aws/azure/someone else. Lack of full-featured OSS (w/ no SaaS necessary) for on-prem, or at least a clear way to let us transparently swap something like Keycloak for those folks, is an instant no. Yeah, we have a number of clients who use us just like this (both SaaS and on-prem, often as an identity broker) and are willing to pay our license fees for the support, the documentation and the functionality. I've also reached out to people who seemed like a fit and they had a hard requirement for OSS. Different strokes for different folks.

mooreds 6y ago

Thanks, definitely appreciate the perspective and thoughtful answers. I don't think that worries about a cloud provider eating the lunch a company has set (to get metaphorical on you) is solely limited to VC funded companies, but I do appreciate they're more likely to worry (see ElasticSearch, of course). > but not every infra project has to immediately turn into a 10K employee company. Couldn't agree more! Cheers!

lmeyerov 6y ago
Also, I'm not sure I buy the concern about aws & friends in this space for a few reasons: -- Now that SaaS for identity is established, the natural next step is OSS versions that come with SaaS, so if you're starting fresh and know that's coming... it seems short-sighted to start without that -- aws & friends have their own identity products, so given the already-commoditized market, they're unlikely to want to be pushing your n+1 one OSS seems more like a growth driver here than a risk b/c of the competitive market, though I can see that being unsettling to traditional business/VC types who are out of touch with the market. What the value-add for a managed layer is seems like "a lot possible", e.g., scale, support, multi-cloud, so I'd expect customers to pull you pretty quick if they didn't already. In our case, quite explicitly, we're evaluating a path where on-prem single-tenant users can bundle & self-serve something (SSO/LDAP/...), while for our saas tier, we can hook into something normal by aws/azure/someone else. Lack of full-featured OSS (w/ no SaaS necessary) for on-prem, or at least a clear way to let us transparently swap something like Keycloak for those folks, is an instant no.
- mooreds 6y ago
  Good points about AWS, though I will say that AWS has multiple different document databases and caching engines, so if there was customer demand, I don't doubt that they would run a different identity service. I have not used it, but from what I've seen, Cognito doesn't seem to get much love. > OSS seems more like a growth driver here than a risk b/c of the competitive market, though I can see that being unsettling to traditional business/VC types who are out of touch with the market. I hope you weren't talking about me :) . We'll see, I certainly some funded auth startups going the open core/OSS route (SuperTokens, Clerky, WorkOS). > In our case, quite explicitly, we're evaluating a path where on-prem single-tenant users can bundle & self-serve something (SSO/LDAP/...), while for our saas tier, we can hook into something normal by aws/azure/someone else. Lack of full-featured OSS (w/ no SaaS necessary) for on-prem, or at least a clear way to let us transparently swap something like Keycloak for those folks, is an instant no. Yeah, we have a number of clients who use us just like this (both SaaS and on-prem, often as an identity broker) and are willing to pay our license fees for the support, the documentation and the functionality. I've also reached out to people who seemed like a fit and they had a hard requirement for OSS. Different strokes for different folks.