17 ms·

Make enterprise features open source

431 points by ahachete 4y ago

lol_catz 4y ago
vitess vs citus.. which is superior and why?
whitepoplar 4y ago
This is fantastic, and should bring some relief to those who want to self-host Citus outside of Azure. I wonder if TimescaleDB's recent license changes had anything to do with this.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- mfreed 4y ago
  I'm not sure what "recent license changes" you are referring to? The Timescale License was introduced in late 2018, although we never _relicensed_ any of our Apache 2 code, we only created a space for _new_ capabilities to be developed under these terms. There were a few changes to the license in Sept 2020, but those only liberalized a few clauses (including from feedback we received from the Hacker News community, including the "right to repair" and "right to improve"). At the time, we also moved any remaining "enterprise" features from an Enterprise/Paid license into the TSL/Community/Free license. https://www.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-business-in-cloud-era-v2/ https://www.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-business... We haven't changed anything since, nor have we ever moved any Apache-2 code into the TSL. (Timescale cofounder)
  - whitepoplar 4y ago
    Time really flies by! I was referring to you guys moving all enterprise features into the TSL/Community license.
endisneigh 4y ago
Is it possible to easily configure Postgres/Citus such that you can replicate your database across a managed offering such that if your database load is sufficiently high then you start using the managed offering, otherwise you use your managed offering? Being able to combine the cheap compute of something like Hetzner with the high availability of a managed offering would be nice.
- mslot 4y ago
  Not right now. It's definitely something that's on our radar, but it'll take a while to get there.
  - Tostino 4y ago
    Are there any high level thoughts on how you'd approach that, or is it mainly just a "we want that at some point" in the feature list right now?
  - stingraycharles 4y ago
    Am I correct that such functionality effectively requires the ability to scale compute independently from storage?
    - namibj 4y ago
      You submit a request for more storage and an additional disk appears a day or two later.
JelteF 4y ago
Really nice seeing this commit, that I pushed this morning to Github, on the frontpage of HN a few hours later :) It's awesome that other people are just as excited about open-sourcing as we are. But if you like this definitely keep an eye on our blog[1] and/or twitter[2] for the upcoming "official" announcements. They will have a lot more info on this and all the other cool changes things that are part of Citus 11. [1]: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/ https://www.citusdata.com/blog/ [2]: https://twitter.com/citusdata https://twitter.com/citusdata
- ozgune 4y ago
  +1 on Jelte's sentiment Btw HN, if you share the sentiment about more open source, please feel free to star us on GitHub :)
  - andreareina 4y ago
    > Don't solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions. Users should vote and comment when they run across something they personally find interesting—not for promotion. Probably applies
    - eatonphil 4y ago
      It's less "cool" if you ask for it but no I don't read the HN guidelines as applying here.
- ahachete 4y ago
  I submitted the news, sorry if I spoiled the announcement! ;) But as soon as I received the news, and these are definitely good news, I wanted to share it with the HN crowd :) BTW, is item #8 (or any other, for that matter) an alternative to having to use .pgpass? Because this is a notable itch towards automation of Citus, would be great to see this resolved in the open source version. Congratulations for the commit!
  - pvg 4y ago
    as soon as I received the news, and these are definitely good news, I wanted to share it with the HN crowd It's a natural impulse but somewhat counterintuitively https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22no%20harm%20in%20waiting%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... One way to think of it is as repetition-prevention since a big enough story is going to end up on the front page one way or the other.
richbell 4y ago
Off topic, but I just realized that I've been calling it "Citrus" for years.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I read it as that until I just saw this comment. I wonder if it’s pronounced site-us or sit-us (kite-us is probably out).
  - clairegiordano 4y ago
    Pronounced as site-us (or sight-us, as in "eyesight") Side-note, I had a bit of fun with the pronunciation & spelling challenges of working on Postgres and Citus here: https://twitter.com/clairegiordano/status/1503784151614320640?s=20&t=EZIuiJF5AgReMGkKbS5Rjw https://twitter.com/clairegiordano/status/150378415161432064...
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
eric4smith 4y ago
Good product. We were using it for a few years and though we transitioned to pure PG - that database is still named “citus” in honor of what citus did for us. Glad to see the open sourcing - especially the backups (which is why we switched). That’s really important.
mixmastamyk 4y ago
Interesting, what does that leave proprietary?
- aeyes 4y ago
  Apparently nothing :-). The commit says all enterprise features and the associated PR says that they will retire the internal enterprise repo.
  - mixmastamyk 4y ago
    Wow, so whole thing open-source? What can be lifted straight into PG proper? Licenses are compatible I hope.
    - justinjlynn 4y ago
      Citus itself is AGPL, iirc, and it uses the PostgreSQL extension API and isn't a fork. Besides being carried in the contribs extension tree and possibly being a part of project internal tests, I don't really see what having it developed there would necessarily bring. Are there any other benefits/drawbacks I've missed?
    - stubish 4y ago
      Of course, PG maintainers will only want to lift what they can maintain and has a compatible release cadence. But it wouldn't be the first time that Citus' work has landed in PG core.
goodells 4y ago
I remember years ago, Citus offered people a free pair of socks as a bribe for signing up for their newsletter. I loved my database socks and gave them some free advertising during college.
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
mholt 4y ago
We did this with Caddy a couple years ago. Best decision the project ever made.
- jordn 4y ago
  So grateful for Caddy!
- fuzzythinker 4y ago
  Want to share why?
  - Intermernet 4y ago
    If you follow the references from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(web_server)#Financial_backing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(web_server)#Financial_b... You'll see a bunch of discussion covering the saga (including a lot of it on HN). I for one am immensely happy that mholt and team made the decision to re-open source Caddy, and I wish them all the best in the future. It's truly a wonderful piece of software.
    - reitanqild 4y ago
      As an early backer of Caddy I don't think I ever touched it again after what I felt as a bait and switch weeks(?) after my donation to an open source product. Maybe it is time to reconsider now, because I really really really liked Caddy back then, which is probably why I donated enough to make me equally annoyed when I felt I had been had.
- steve_taylor 4y ago
  Caddy is amazing! My most favourite feature at the moment is on-demand TLS, which I'm using in my SaaS project (not launched yet) to allow customers to use a custom domain.
  - mholt 4y ago
    Great to hear! Hope it serves you well.
sakesun 4y ago
Give Microsoft some hug here.
remram 4y ago
From the title, I thought this would be a call for them to make it open source, not them making the change. This is great!
cvccvroomvroom 4y ago
Impressive. Much respect. Enterprise crippleware is obnoxious. So are restrictive and radioactive licenses like AGPL. What bugs me are those who speak out of the sides of their mouth how it's not with different flavors of rationalized BS. Bug fixing priority, tech support, and integration consulting are the proper places to monetize, not features for-profit express turnpike or telling me what I can't do with code.
- riskneutral 4y ago
  > Bug fixing priority, tech support, and integration consulting are the proper places to monetize Yeah ... the problem is, you can't charge a corporate millions of dollars for that off the bat, but you sure can charge the millions of dollars for software licensing. And they are happy to pay it. In fact, they want to pay to it, it makes them feel more secure and they have a budget to use.
  - cvccvroomvroom 4y ago
    The easy way to do that is to have themes and branding. Call it something else. "Enterprise Edition". Then they can enjoy the nice, warm fuzzy feeling of different logos.
- YPPH 4y ago
  I don't see anything wrong with the AGPL. If $bigCorp wants to rent access to improved versions of my software, they should give me the changes.
  - pabs3 4y ago
    AGPL doesn't require that $bigCorp give you the changes, only that they give their users the changes. You could get changes from existing users, but they might not be willing or able to help you. You could become a user, but that could be expensive or $bigCorp could just ban you from the service.
    - YPPH 4y ago
andy_ppp 4y ago
This is great news I will definitely try to support a model where citus get paid (presumably consultancy) in the future and it’ll be my go to upgrade from postgres. I could probably use their sharding features fairly soon on the startup I’m building!
revskill 4y ago
It's a bit late as i see. But it's better late than never. Hope more open source adaptation, to a point that i could use it in production.
jimnotgym 4y ago
For anyone else out there browsing hn and unaware of Citus...I will save you the search I just did. Citus appears to be an extension to Postgres that allows easier distribution, replication, sharding, parrallelism etc.
Scorpiion 4y ago
I wonder if the decision to make all enterprise features open source was affected/influenced by the Neon release/announcement recently? The timing makes me wonder, or has this been planned for a very long time? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31753345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31753345 Either way, great news! I've been curious to try out Citus many times but the fact that many of the best parts has been closed has held me back a bit, I think it's great with more postgresql open source extention options.
traceroute66 4y ago
> 12. Support for `sslkey` and `sslcert` There is a special place in hell for companies that consider basic encryption to be an "enterprise" feature in 2022.
- JelteF 4y ago
  This one surprised all of us on the Citus dev team, when we were reviewing what we were open sourcing. This "feature" was never intended to be Enterprise only and not having it in the open source repo was simply an honest mistake. If some open source user had asked for it I'm certain we would have also added it to the open source version. But so far no-one asked. At least this mistake is resolved now, and no new ones like it should occur, since we will only commit to the open source repo now.
  - traceroute66 4y ago
    Thank you for clarifying the Citus position. For my part, I should perhaps clarify (if it was not already obvious) that my comment was a generic comment intended towards all such companies and not specifically targeted at Citus.
polskibus 4y ago
Has anyone benchmarked city’s column store against other competing solutions, for example clickhouse or std row store in postgresql?
caloique 4y ago
simonw 4y ago
Does anyone have any experience building with Citus they can share? I've been reading about it for years and it's always sounded very impressive to me - the magic sauce that you can sprinkle on regular PostgreSQL to have it scale horizontally - but I haven't yet had the opportunity to try it.
- maxpert 4y ago
  Same here, wanna see some production usage testimonials. Plus has someone compared it to CockroachDB? I understand they are two different technologies with broader strokes of same idea of scaling Postgres horizontally but still would love to see some sort of comparison and differences.
  - __s 4y ago
    There's some listed at https://www.citusdata.com/customers https://www.citusdata.com/customers
- zeandcode 4y ago
  Same here, unfortunately I've no chance yet to try
- clairegiordano 4y ago
  I'm not a user per se Simon, but I work on the Citus team and can share links to a few customer stories. + Implementation of the UK Coronavirus Dashboard running on Citus and Postgres, a post co-authored by the technical lead of the dashboard, Pouria Hadjibagheri: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2021/12/11/uk-covid-19-dashboard-built-using-postgres-and-citus/ https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2021/12/11/uk-covid-19-dashbo... + Architecting petabyte scale analytics using Postgres and Citus, based on an interview with the user, Min Wei: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2019/12/07/petabyte-scale-analytics-postgres-on-azure-with-citus/ https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2019/12/07/petabyte-scale-ana... + Video of a customer talk about scaling a SaaS application on Citus by Jonathan Denney at ConvertFlow: https://youtu.be/PzGNpaGeHE4 https://youtu.be/PzGNpaGeHE4
- scurvy 4y ago
dang 4y ago
Related announcement: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2022/06/17/citus-11-goes-fully-open-source/ https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2022/06/17/citus-11-goes-full...

431 points by ahachete 4y ago

vitess vs citus.. which is superior and why?

This is fantastic, and should bring some relief to those who want to self-host Citus outside of Azure. I wonder if TimescaleDB's recent license changes had anything to do with this.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
mfreed 4y ago
I'm not sure what "recent license changes" you are referring to? The Timescale License was introduced in late 2018, although we never _relicensed_ any of our Apache 2 code, we only created a space for _new_ capabilities to be developed under these terms. There were a few changes to the license in Sept 2020, but those only liberalized a few clauses (including from feedback we received from the Hacker News community, including the "right to repair" and "right to improve"). At the time, we also moved any remaining "enterprise" features from an Enterprise/Paid license into the TSL/Community/Free license. https://www.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-business-in-cloud-era-v2/ https://www.timescale.com/blog/building-open-source-business... We haven't changed anything since, nor have we ever moved any Apache-2 code into the TSL. (Timescale cofounder)
- whitepoplar 4y ago
  Time really flies by! I was referring to you guys moving all enterprise features into the TSL/Community license.

endisneigh 4y ago

Is it possible to easily configure Postgres/Citus such that you can replicate your database across a managed offering such that if your database load is sufficiently high then you start using the managed offering, otherwise you use your managed offering? Being able to combine the cheap compute of something like Hetzner with the high availability of a managed offering would be nice.

mslot 4y ago
Not right now. It's definitely something that's on our radar, but it'll take a while to get there.
- Tostino 4y ago
  Are there any high level thoughts on how you'd approach that, or is it mainly just a "we want that at some point" in the feature list right now?
- stingraycharles 4y ago
  Am I correct that such functionality effectively requires the ability to scale compute independently from storage?
  - namibj 4y ago
    You submit a request for more storage and an additional disk appears a day or two later.

JelteF 4y ago

Really nice seeing this commit, that I pushed this morning to Github, on the frontpage of HN a few hours later :) It's awesome that other people are just as excited about open-sourcing as we are. But if you like this definitely keep an eye on our blog[1] and/or twitter[2] for the upcoming "official" announcements. They will have a lot more info on this and all the other cool changes things that are part of Citus 11. [1]: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/ https://www.citusdata.com/blog/ [2]: https://twitter.com/citusdata https://twitter.com/citusdata

ozgune 4y ago
+1 on Jelte's sentiment Btw HN, if you share the sentiment about more open source, please feel free to star us on GitHub :)
- andreareina 4y ago
  > Don't solicit upvotes, comments, or submissions. Users should vote and comment when they run across something they personally find interesting—not for promotion. Probably applies
  - eatonphil 4y ago
    It's less "cool" if you ask for it but no I don't read the HN guidelines as applying here.
ahachete 4y ago
I submitted the news, sorry if I spoiled the announcement! ;) But as soon as I received the news, and these are definitely good news, I wanted to share it with the HN crowd :) BTW, is item #8 (or any other, for that matter) an alternative to having to use .pgpass? Because this is a notable itch towards automation of Citus, would be great to see this resolved in the open source version. Congratulations for the commit!
- pvg 4y ago
  as soon as I received the news, and these are definitely good news, I wanted to share it with the HN crowd It's a natural impulse but somewhat counterintuitively https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&query=by%3Adang%20%22no%20harm%20in%20waiting%22&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu... One way to think of it is as repetition-prevention since a big enough story is going to end up on the front page one way or the other.

richbell 4y ago

Off topic, but I just realized that I've been calling it "Citrus" for years.

bombcar 4y ago
I read it as that until I just saw this comment. I wonder if it’s pronounced site-us or sit-us (kite-us is probably out).
- clairegiordano 4y ago
  Pronounced as site-us (or sight-us, as in "eyesight") Side-note, I had a bit of fun with the pronunciation & spelling challenges of working on Postgres and Citus here: https://twitter.com/clairegiordano/status/1503784151614320640?s=20&t=EZIuiJF5AgReMGkKbS5Rjw https://twitter.com/clairegiordano/status/150378415161432064...

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

eric4smith 4y ago

Good product. We were using it for a few years and though we transitioned to pure PG - that database is still named “citus” in honor of what citus did for us. Glad to see the open sourcing - especially the backups (which is why we switched). That’s really important.

mixmastamyk 4y ago

Interesting, what does that leave proprietary?

aeyes 4y ago
Apparently nothing :-). The commit says all enterprise features and the associated PR says that they will retire the internal enterprise repo.
- mixmastamyk 4y ago
  Wow, so whole thing open-source? What can be lifted straight into PG proper? Licenses are compatible I hope.
  - justinjlynn 4y ago
    Citus itself is AGPL, iirc, and it uses the PostgreSQL extension API and isn't a fork. Besides being carried in the contribs extension tree and possibly being a part of project internal tests, I don't really see what having it developed there would necessarily bring. Are there any other benefits/drawbacks I've missed?
  - stubish 4y ago
    Of course, PG maintainers will only want to lift what they can maintain and has a compatible release cadence. But it wouldn't be the first time that Citus' work has landed in PG core.

goodells 4y ago

I remember years ago, Citus offered people a free pair of socks as a bribe for signing up for their newsletter. I loved my database socks and gave them some free advertising during college.

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

mholt 4y ago

We did this with Caddy a couple years ago. Best decision the project ever made.

jordn 4y ago
So grateful for Caddy!
fuzzythinker 4y ago
Want to share why?
- Intermernet 4y ago
  If you follow the references from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(web_server)#Financial_backing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caddy_(web_server)#Financial_b... You'll see a bunch of discussion covering the saga (including a lot of it on HN). I for one am immensely happy that mholt and team made the decision to re-open source Caddy, and I wish them all the best in the future. It's truly a wonderful piece of software.
  - reitanqild 4y ago
    As an early backer of Caddy I don't think I ever touched it again after what I felt as a bait and switch weeks(?) after my donation to an open source product. Maybe it is time to reconsider now, because I really really really liked Caddy back then, which is probably why I donated enough to make me equally annoyed when I felt I had been had.
steve_taylor 4y ago
Caddy is amazing! My most favourite feature at the moment is on-demand TLS, which I'm using in my SaaS project (not launched yet) to allow customers to use a custom domain.
- mholt 4y ago
  Great to hear! Hope it serves you well.

sakesun 4y ago

Give Microsoft some hug here.

remram 4y ago

From the title, I thought this would be a call for them to make it open source, not them making the change. This is great!

cvccvroomvroom 4y ago

Impressive. Much respect. Enterprise crippleware is obnoxious. So are restrictive and radioactive licenses like AGPL. What bugs me are those who speak out of the sides of their mouth how it's not with different flavors of rationalized BS. Bug fixing priority, tech support, and integration consulting are the proper places to monetize, not features for-profit express turnpike or telling me what I can't do with code.

riskneutral 4y ago
> Bug fixing priority, tech support, and integration consulting are the proper places to monetize Yeah ... the problem is, you can't charge a corporate millions of dollars for that off the bat, but you sure can charge the millions of dollars for software licensing. And they are happy to pay it. In fact, they want to pay to it, it makes them feel more secure and they have a budget to use.
- cvccvroomvroom 4y ago
  The easy way to do that is to have themes and branding. Call it something else. "Enterprise Edition". Then they can enjoy the nice, warm fuzzy feeling of different logos.
YPPH 4y ago
I don't see anything wrong with the AGPL. If $bigCorp wants to rent access to improved versions of my software, they should give me the changes.
- pabs3 4y ago
  AGPL doesn't require that $bigCorp give you the changes, only that they give their users the changes. You could get changes from existing users, but they might not be willing or able to help you. You could become a user, but that could be expensive or $bigCorp could just ban you from the service.
  - YPPH 4y ago

andy_ppp 4y ago

This is great news I will definitely try to support a model where citus get paid (presumably consultancy) in the future and it’ll be my go to upgrade from postgres. I could probably use their sharding features fairly soon on the startup I’m building!

revskill 4y ago

It's a bit late as i see. But it's better late than never. Hope more open source adaptation, to a point that i could use it in production.

jimnotgym 4y ago

For anyone else out there browsing hn and unaware of Citus...I will save you the search I just did. Citus appears to be an extension to Postgres that allows easier distribution, replication, sharding, parrallelism etc.

Scorpiion 4y ago

I wonder if the decision to make all enterprise features open source was affected/influenced by the Neon release/announcement recently? The timing makes me wonder, or has this been planned for a very long time? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31753345 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31753345 Either way, great news! I've been curious to try out Citus many times but the fact that many of the best parts has been closed has held me back a bit, I think it's great with more postgresql open source extention options.

traceroute66 4y ago

> 12. Support for `sslkey` and `sslcert` There is a special place in hell for companies that consider basic encryption to be an "enterprise" feature in 2022.

JelteF 4y ago
This one surprised all of us on the Citus dev team, when we were reviewing what we were open sourcing. This "feature" was never intended to be Enterprise only and not having it in the open source repo was simply an honest mistake. If some open source user had asked for it I'm certain we would have also added it to the open source version. But so far no-one asked. At least this mistake is resolved now, and no new ones like it should occur, since we will only commit to the open source repo now.
- traceroute66 4y ago
  Thank you for clarifying the Citus position. For my part, I should perhaps clarify (if it was not already obvious) that my comment was a generic comment intended towards all such companies and not specifically targeted at Citus.

polskibus 4y ago

Has anyone benchmarked city’s column store against other competing solutions, for example clickhouse or std row store in postgresql?

caloique 4y ago

simonw 4y ago

Does anyone have any experience building with Citus they can share? I've been reading about it for years and it's always sounded very impressive to me - the magic sauce that you can sprinkle on regular PostgreSQL to have it scale horizontally - but I haven't yet had the opportunity to try it.

maxpert 4y ago
Same here, wanna see some production usage testimonials. Plus has someone compared it to CockroachDB? I understand they are two different technologies with broader strokes of same idea of scaling Postgres horizontally but still would love to see some sort of comparison and differences.
- __s 4y ago
  There's some listed at https://www.citusdata.com/customers https://www.citusdata.com/customers
zeandcode 4y ago
Same here, unfortunately I've no chance yet to try
clairegiordano 4y ago
I'm not a user per se Simon, but I work on the Citus team and can share links to a few customer stories. + Implementation of the UK Coronavirus Dashboard running on Citus and Postgres, a post co-authored by the technical lead of the dashboard, Pouria Hadjibagheri: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2021/12/11/uk-covid-19-dashboard-built-using-postgres-and-citus/ https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2021/12/11/uk-covid-19-dashbo... + Architecting petabyte scale analytics using Postgres and Citus, based on an interview with the user, Min Wei: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2019/12/07/petabyte-scale-analytics-postgres-on-azure-with-citus/ https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2019/12/07/petabyte-scale-ana... + Video of a customer talk about scaling a SaaS application on Citus by Jonathan Denney at ConvertFlow: https://youtu.be/PzGNpaGeHE4 https://youtu.be/PzGNpaGeHE4
scurvy 4y ago

dang 4y ago

Related announcement: https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2022/06/17/citus-11-goes-fully-open-source/ https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2022/06/17/citus-11-goes-full...