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Yeah AWS ES totally has value. I'm aware ES decided to go with an open licence but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that they did that to try to g

Yeah AWS ES totally has value. I'm aware ES decided to go with an open licence but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that they did that to try to gain traction and cross-sell other services, such as managed hosting. If you have a friend round to stay for the weekend and say "stay as long as you want", wouldn't you be annoyed if they were still there 10 years later? There is such a thing as the spirit vs the letter of the law.

vladvasiliu 5y ago
> it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that they did that to try to gain traction and cross-sell other services, such as managed hosting. I sympathize with that, and would say that they took this chance and lost. But again, what rubs me the wrong way is that AWS is not just selling a "packaged" version of ES for more money, the same exact thing that Elastic sells. They're selling the service around it. Which they built themselves. My client runs an ES cluster on a bunch of fairly fat EC2 instances, which would cost an arm and a leg if they went through Elastic Cloud. Are we the friend who's still there ten years later? I probably still wouldn't agree with it, but I guess I would have less of an issue with this line of argument if it weren't just about ES but about every [Thing]Service that AWS sells, in particular RDS. Hell, why is there no outcry about them selling EC2 instances with Ubuntu? Or even "worse", their "custom" distribution (Amazon Linux). Are they sending a check regularly to Linus and / or to the Linux Foundation (or whoever is in charge of Linux as a "product")? This, to me, looks a lot like a sore loser situation. ES tried to take on AWS selling a service around a product and lost. I understand it stings even worse that said product is their product. But maybe they should've stuck to building an awesome service around Lucene that they could sell for profit. Wait... this sounds familiar, doesn't it? I'm not saying this is a great situation for Elastic to be in. But I don't like the way they're trying to dance around it and not assume their errors. They wanted to build a second product (Elastic Cloud) around their first (Elasticsearch) and it failed to attract the expected success. Instead of asking themselves why that is, they decided to change the rules of the game. Now, they're of course allowed to do this, Elasticsearch being their product and all. But they can't expect for everybody to be on board with it. Maybe their product sucked compared to AWS' or simply wasn't good enough to warrant the hassle of going through a second supplier or whatever.
- nprateem 5y ago
  I think you nailed it in the last sentence. AWS will one day be able to extract near monopoly profits due to costs of migration. I expect the ES didn't realise how popular it'd end up being so went open source, and later realised they'd shot themselves in the foot but knew they'd rub people up the wrong way if they went closed source so they kicked the can down the road... And here we are

vladvasiliu 5y ago

> it doesn't take a rocket scientist to work out that they did that to try to gain traction and cross-sell other services, such as managed hosting. I sympathize with that, and would say that they took this chance and lost. But again, what rubs me the wrong way is that AWS is not just selling a "packaged" version of ES for more money, the same exact thing that Elastic sells. They're selling the service around it. Which they built themselves. My client runs an ES cluster on a bunch of fairly fat EC2 instances, which would cost an arm and a leg if they went through Elastic Cloud. Are we the friend who's still there ten years later? I probably still wouldn't agree with it, but I guess I would have less of an issue with this line of argument if it weren't just about ES but about every [Thing]Service that AWS sells, in particular RDS. Hell, why is there no outcry about them selling EC2 instances with Ubuntu? Or even "worse", their "custom" distribution (Amazon Linux). Are they sending a check regularly to Linus and / or to the Linux Foundation (or whoever is in charge of Linux as a "product")? This, to me, looks a lot like a sore loser situation. ES tried to take on AWS selling a service around a product and lost. I understand it stings even worse that said product is their product. But maybe they should've stuck to building an awesome service around Lucene that they could sell for profit. Wait... this sounds familiar, doesn't it? I'm not saying this is a great situation for Elastic to be in. But I don't like the way they're trying to dance around it and not assume their errors. They wanted to build a second product (Elastic Cloud) around their first (Elasticsearch) and it failed to attract the expected success. Instead of asking themselves why that is, they decided to change the rules of the game. Now, they're of course allowed to do this, Elasticsearch being their product and all. But they can't expect for everybody to be on board with it. Maybe their product sucked compared to AWS' or simply wasn't good enough to warrant the hassle of going through a second supplier or whatever.

nprateem 5y ago
I think you nailed it in the last sentence. AWS will one day be able to extract near monopoly profits due to costs of migration. I expect the ES didn't realise how popular it'd end up being so went open source, and later realised they'd shot themselves in the foot but knew they'd rub people up the wrong way if they went closed source so they kicked the can down the road... And here we are