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I use to be a huge proponent of Elastic.co for search. I paid for their Elastic Cloud Enterprise product to offer an internally hosted Elastic as a Service. We

I use to be a huge proponent of Elastic.co for search. I paid for their Elastic Cloud Enterprise product to offer an internally hosted Elastic as a Service. We ran a proof of concept with the the open source Elastic Stack before requesting the funding to get commercial support and the extra management features. I'm not sure I can recommend them anymore. The company doesn't seem to understand their customer's journey and are rejecting the methods that brought them success.

echelon 5y ago
It's hard to blame them when Amazon is eating their lunch. Well, it's more like they made a sandwich, Amazon stole it, and now Amazon is selling it to other people. Meanwhile Elastic.co is starving. It's not a fair game anymore. I hope the DOJ breaks them up into three or more companies.
- __blockcipher__ 5y ago
  This is a false narrative. Both Elastic and Amazon are making a killing. > Elastic (NYSE: ESTC) ("Elastic"), the company behind Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack, announced strong results for its fourth quarter and full fiscal year (ended April 30, 2021). Total revenue was $177.6 million, an increase of 44% year-over-year, or 39% on a constant currency basis.
  - jimmydorry 5y ago
    Revenue only tells us how much business they conducted, not how much of a "killing" they made. Profits is what would tell you that, which I guarentee are going to be far less than their $177.6 million in revenue.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      You don't have to guess: they're a public company. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ESTC/financials?p=ESTC https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ESTC/financials?p=ESTC
      - edoceo 5y ago
        Look for Normalized EBITDA. It's -121! A negative number isn't really killing it. Unless your growth number is poppin!
  - Godel_unicode 5y ago
    Is that true? Let's examine this claim a bit more closely. Net profit margin for the quarter -24.38%, net income for the quarter -43.3M, sales growth slowing by double-digit percent every year since 2018. It's possible to take in a ton of money and still lose money.
    - Mikeb85 5y ago
      I'm gonna go out on a limb and say if they're losing money with $177 million in revenue it's because they're expanding quickly, made a bunch of acquisitions, etc... No way they're losing money on operations. Edit - just looked it up, they have free cash flow for the year and a $400 million cash position. Tons of deferred revenue too.
- zekrioca 5y ago
  It is interesting, because Amazon used to claim [1] others would be doing to them exactly what they are doing to others today. [1] My Conversation with Jeff Bezos (2000) - https://web.archive.org/web/20040215160333/http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2000/bezos_0300.html https://web.archive.org/web/20040215160333/http://www.oreill...
- rpdillon 5y ago
  I don't understand this argument. It's weird enough to me when folks say "steal" in the context of copyright, but in the context of FLOSS software, it seems wholly inappropriate. Third-party hosting of open source is the norm, not the exception, in my experience. The antitrust argument seems orthogonal: lots of small companies make money hosting FLOSS software (Bitnami[0] comes to mind, but so do other hosting companies like Dreamhost). I just searched "elasticsearch hosting" on DDG[1], and Elastic is the 5th result, behind four companies I've never heard of. In many ways, that's exactly what makes FLOSS so attractive to me: if one provider isn't suitable, I can switch. I was very grateful for this in 2013 when I had a huge issue with a change in how LShift was hosting RabbitMQ, and I was able to move my company's cluster over to CloudAMQP instead. I had a similar issue with Elastic in 2016: they didn't offer compute-heavy nodes, but our application was compute heavy (geohashing-intensive for the majority of queries). I discussed with the Elastic sales team, and they said they had no timeline for this, so we migrated the company to AWS ElasticSearch. So I guess I'm not sure how things are improved if Amazon is broken up...even if AWS had to stand on its own, this seems like it would remain a proven business strategy that customers value and is used across the industry. [0]: https://bitnami.com/stack/elasticsearch https://bitnami.com/stack/elasticsearch [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elasticsearch+hosting https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elasticsearch+hosting
- blackoil 5y ago
  They made an open sandwich recipe with help of common folks. Some were making at home but lot were buying from them as it is a complex sandwich to make. Starbuck started selling same sandwich because it wwas getting popular. Good for customers they have two competing vendors for it now. But ES is unhappy because the multi billion valuation is justified only if they are a monopoly.
toomuchtodo 5y ago
It is easy to judge another’s actions from afar when it’s their meal and roof they’re working for. It’s okay for Amazon (a trillion dollar company) to make money off of their work but not themselves? Imho, the problem isn’t “well it’s not open source anymore then.” The problem is people who give more weight to a religion/philosophy than sustainability. Who cares if it’s open source if the people developing it can’t support themselves? Fair code > open source. https://faircode.io/ https://faircode.io/
- YPPH 5y ago
  If they don't like it, they shouldn't have licensed their software under a free software license. This was an entirely foreseeable consequence. They only have themselves to blame. The AGPL generally fixes this perceived problem, but means that several large players (like Google) will never touch your code with a ten foot pole, let alone improve it. So, there's some difficult decision-making at the inception stage of a project - what do you value more? Sony forked FreeBSD and used it as a substantial component of their operating system for their PlayStation 5, a product which they will make money off (in the long run, at least). No changes are available to anyone. No one at FreeBSD is jumping up and down about it. Maybe because there's more to a software project than maximising profit.
  - toomuchtodo 5y ago
    Heaven forbid a FAANG doesn’t touch your code. Look at all the exposure you’ll miss out on. They might actually have to spend resources to write and maintain the code themselves, instead of open source maintainers begging for scraps [1]. The horror. The homebrew maintainer couldn’t even get hired at Google [2] if I recall, even though they’re big fans of using the tooling internally! [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-giants-chastened-by-heartbleed-finally-agree-to-fund-openssl/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-... (OpenSSL Software Foundation President Steve Marquess wrote in a blog post last week that OpenSSL typically receives about $2,000 in donations a year and has just one employee who works full time on the open source code.) [2] https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 (Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off.)
nuker 5y ago
Reminds me of pfSense vs OPNsense saga
that_guy_iain 5y ago
Basically, they make it clear their library doesn’t work with a different data store and thereby avoiding people reporting bugs due to incompatiblities between the two? It seems very reasonable.
- fabbari 5y ago
  As a minor version change that will break software currently running without problems? Not very reasonable if you ask me - especially since wire protocol is checked on the client side.

echelon 5y ago

It's hard to blame them when Amazon is eating their lunch. Well, it's more like they made a sandwich, Amazon stole it, and now Amazon is selling it to other people. Meanwhile Elastic.co is starving. It's not a fair game anymore. I hope the DOJ breaks them up into three or more companies.

__blockcipher__ 5y ago
This is a false narrative. Both Elastic and Amazon are making a killing. > Elastic (NYSE: ESTC) ("Elastic"), the company behind Elasticsearch and the Elastic Stack, announced strong results for its fourth quarter and full fiscal year (ended April 30, 2021). Total revenue was $177.6 million, an increase of 44% year-over-year, or 39% on a constant currency basis.
- jimmydorry 5y ago
  Revenue only tells us how much business they conducted, not how much of a "killing" they made. Profits is what would tell you that, which I guarentee are going to be far less than their $177.6 million in revenue.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    You don't have to guess: they're a public company. https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ESTC/financials?p=ESTC https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/ESTC/financials?p=ESTC
    - edoceo 5y ago
      Look for Normalized EBITDA. It's -121! A negative number isn't really killing it. Unless your growth number is poppin!
- Godel_unicode 5y ago
  Is that true? Let's examine this claim a bit more closely. Net profit margin for the quarter -24.38%, net income for the quarter -43.3M, sales growth slowing by double-digit percent every year since 2018. It's possible to take in a ton of money and still lose money.
  - Mikeb85 5y ago
    I'm gonna go out on a limb and say if they're losing money with $177 million in revenue it's because they're expanding quickly, made a bunch of acquisitions, etc... No way they're losing money on operations. Edit - just looked it up, they have free cash flow for the year and a $400 million cash position. Tons of deferred revenue too.
zekrioca 5y ago
It is interesting, because Amazon used to claim [1] others would be doing to them exactly what they are doing to others today. [1] My Conversation with Jeff Bezos (2000) - https://web.archive.org/web/20040215160333/http://www.oreilly.com/pub/a/oreilly/ask_tim/2000/bezos_0300.html https://web.archive.org/web/20040215160333/http://www.oreill...
rpdillon 5y ago
I don't understand this argument. It's weird enough to me when folks say "steal" in the context of copyright, but in the context of FLOSS software, it seems wholly inappropriate. Third-party hosting of open source is the norm, not the exception, in my experience. The antitrust argument seems orthogonal: lots of small companies make money hosting FLOSS software (Bitnami[0] comes to mind, but so do other hosting companies like Dreamhost). I just searched "elasticsearch hosting" on DDG[1], and Elastic is the 5th result, behind four companies I've never heard of. In many ways, that's exactly what makes FLOSS so attractive to me: if one provider isn't suitable, I can switch. I was very grateful for this in 2013 when I had a huge issue with a change in how LShift was hosting RabbitMQ, and I was able to move my company's cluster over to CloudAMQP instead. I had a similar issue with Elastic in 2016: they didn't offer compute-heavy nodes, but our application was compute heavy (geohashing-intensive for the majority of queries). I discussed with the Elastic sales team, and they said they had no timeline for this, so we migrated the company to AWS ElasticSearch. So I guess I'm not sure how things are improved if Amazon is broken up...even if AWS had to stand on its own, this seems like it would remain a proven business strategy that customers value and is used across the industry. [0]: https://bitnami.com/stack/elasticsearch https://bitnami.com/stack/elasticsearch [1]: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elasticsearch+hosting https://duckduckgo.com/?q=elasticsearch+hosting
blackoil 5y ago
They made an open sandwich recipe with help of common folks. Some were making at home but lot were buying from them as it is a complex sandwich to make. Starbuck started selling same sandwich because it wwas getting popular. Good for customers they have two competing vendors for it now. But ES is unhappy because the multi billion valuation is justified only if they are a monopoly.

toomuchtodo 5y ago

It is easy to judge another’s actions from afar when it’s their meal and roof they’re working for. It’s okay for Amazon (a trillion dollar company) to make money off of their work but not themselves? Imho, the problem isn’t “well it’s not open source anymore then.” The problem is people who give more weight to a religion/philosophy than sustainability. Who cares if it’s open source if the people developing it can’t support themselves? Fair code > open source. https://faircode.io/ https://faircode.io/

YPPH 5y ago
If they don't like it, they shouldn't have licensed their software under a free software license. This was an entirely foreseeable consequence. They only have themselves to blame. The AGPL generally fixes this perceived problem, but means that several large players (like Google) will never touch your code with a ten foot pole, let alone improve it. So, there's some difficult decision-making at the inception stage of a project - what do you value more? Sony forked FreeBSD and used it as a substantial component of their operating system for their PlayStation 5, a product which they will make money off (in the long run, at least). No changes are available to anyone. No one at FreeBSD is jumping up and down about it. Maybe because there's more to a software project than maximising profit.
- toomuchtodo 5y ago
  Heaven forbid a FAANG doesn’t touch your code. Look at all the exposure you’ll miss out on. They might actually have to spend resources to write and maintain the code themselves, instead of open source maintainers begging for scraps [1]. The horror. The homebrew maintainer couldn’t even get hired at Google [2] if I recall, even though they’re big fans of using the tooling internally! [1] https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-giants-chastened-by-heartbleed-finally-agree-to-fund-openssl/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/tech-... (OpenSSL Software Foundation President Steve Marquess wrote in a blog post last week that OpenSSL typically receives about $2,000 in donations a year and has just one employee who works full time on the open source code.) [2] https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 (Google: 90% of our engineers use the software you wrote (Homebrew), but you can’t invert a binary tree on a whiteboard so fuck off.)

nuker 5y ago

Reminds me of pfSense vs OPNsense saga

that_guy_iain 5y ago

Basically, they make it clear their library doesn’t work with a different data store and thereby avoiding people reporting bugs due to incompatiblities between the two? It seems very reasonable.

fabbari 5y ago
As a minor version change that will break software currently running without problems? Not very reasonable if you ask me - especially since wire protocol is checked on the client side.