5 ms·

It is my understanding that AWS very nearly killed ElasticSearch. If I were [working at] MongoDB, I wouldn't want that to happen to my product, either.

by Yoric 5y ago

jrockway 5y ago
I'm perfectly OK with the "you can't run this code as a service" licenses, but when you get to restricting the spec about the wire format, I think other factors are at play. Like, if Amazon wants to spend millions of dollars writing their own version of MongoDB that is drop-in compatible for existing MongoDB applications, that is great for customers. You, the customer, now have two choice -- options when things don't work out with one implementation. When you use license agreements to restrict that ability, I think it's a statement about the quality of your product -- you think Amazon can do it better than you, so you're going to use the legal system to prevent them from trying. As a database user, that is a signal for me to stay away. It means that when I'm having a scaling emergency there is only one way to fix it -- give most of my revenue to one company. That's scary. Yes, Amazon did almost kill Elasticsearch. I sometimes wonder if the set of circumstances translates 1:1 to other companies. The products have similar names -- AWS has the Elastic Compute Cloud, and then there's this Elastic Search. That's not their product? Nope, just an unfortunate naming choice. And, Elasticsearch was particularly difficult to run at the time, so a hosted option was clearly valuable. And finally, Elasticsearch had a lot of company-killing problems: basically not doing what it said it did. https://aphyr.com/posts/317-call-me-maybe-elasticsearch https://aphyr.com/posts/317-call-me-maybe-elasticsearch At the time, Elasticsearch was losing acknowledged writes. That's a company killer if your only product is a database.

5 ms·

It is my understanding that AWS very nearly killed ElasticSearch. If I were [working at] MongoDB, I wouldn't want that to happen to my product, either.

by Yoric 5y ago

It is my understanding that AWS very nearly killed ElasticSearch. If I were [working at] MongoDB, I wouldn't want that to happen to my product, either.

jrockway 5y ago
I'm perfectly OK with the "you can't run this code as a service" licenses, but when you get to restricting the spec about the wire format, I think other factors are at play. Like, if Amazon wants to spend millions of dollars writing their own version of MongoDB that is drop-in compatible for existing MongoDB applications, that is great for customers. You, the customer, now have two choice -- options when things don't work out with one implementation. When you use license agreements to restrict that ability, I think it's a statement about the quality of your product -- you think Amazon can do it better than you, so you're going to use the legal system to prevent them from trying. As a database user, that is a signal for me to stay away. It means that when I'm having a scaling emergency there is only one way to fix it -- give most of my revenue to one company. That's scary. Yes, Amazon did almost kill Elasticsearch. I sometimes wonder if the set of circumstances translates 1:1 to other companies. The products have similar names -- AWS has the Elastic Compute Cloud, and then there's this Elastic Search. That's not their product? Nope, just an unfortunate naming choice. And, Elasticsearch was particularly difficult to run at the time, so a hosted option was clearly valuable. And finally, Elasticsearch had a lot of company-killing problems: basically not doing what it said it did. https://aphyr.com/posts/317-call-me-maybe-elasticsearch https://aphyr.com/posts/317-call-me-maybe-elasticsearch At the time, Elasticsearch was losing acknowledged writes. That's a company killer if your only product is a database.