6 ms·

To everyone who thinks that $2k/vCPU is a lot of money, it's not. First, if you're running it on an 8-core server, that's $16k per year, which is about what ma

by ccleve 4y ago

To everyone who thinks that $2k/vCPU is a lot of money, it's not. First, if you're running it on an 8-core server, that's $16k per year, which is about what many companies are paying for an enterprise support contract. It's not much when you consider that it gives you access to Akka engineers at the cost of 1/10 of an FTE. Second, the $2k number is a list price. All large enterprise deals are negotiated, and nearly all are discounted from the list price. Akka probably won't discount small deals, but they'll be forced to discount larger ones if the buyer has an alternative. Plus, the buyer will demand SLAs, dedicated support, and will often demand changes to the license and custom work on the software itself (tweaks to make it work with X, etc.) Akka and their larger customers will make it work. The purpose of this license change is to give Akka the ability to get their customers to the table in the first place.

xani_ 4y ago
You can buy a hell lot more computing at 2k/vCPU to offset performance tho. And hiring a consultant for few months to fix your performance problems is also a hell lot cheaper than paying that much per core, forever. > Akka and their larger customers will make it work. The purpose of this license change is to give Akka the ability to get their customers to the table in the first place. Translation: They depend on our software enough that the rewrite is no alternative, they don't have enough onboard talent to fork it, and they have enough money to pay the price.
duskwuff 4y ago
> First, if you're running it on an 8-core server, that's $16k per year, which is about what many companies are paying for an enterprise support contract. Which is exactly why this is so unreasonable. The minimum spend for the "standard" license is 40 cores -- which means you're paying at least $80k/yr for a support contract which won't even assign you an account manager or guarantee a response any faster than "4 business days" (yes, really). And as you scale up, it only gets more expensive, and you don't get anything more for your money.
- ccleve 4y ago
  I did not see the part about the minimum spend. You're right; they'll probably run into significant resistance on that from the smaller customers.
tsss 4y ago
An 8-core server? Please. Just my team uses 70 vCores (peak) in our Kubernetes cluster. Without a custom licensing agreement that's $140k/year. The whole company is bound to pay well over $500k/year. Furthermore, most people here (as usual) seem to be completely ignorant about what Akka is. The vast majority of Akka users only ever interact with Akka through other libraries that depend on it: Akka-HTTP, Akka-Streams, Alpakka Connectors, etc. Hardly anyone actually uses Akka actors directly, the Akka Cluster platform or recently implemented distributed programming features (like Akka persistence) that makes up the business model of Lightbend. It's essentially a runtime system; an implementation detail. It's no surprise that none of these users ever make contributions back to a software that is so far removed from business code.
- res0nat0r 4y ago
  Since they aren't charging any companies that make less than $25 million a year this sounds reasonable. Most folks here don't seem to grasp the cost of most enterprise software, Oracle has been charging 10x this for decades now. https://www.oracle.com/assets/technology-price-list-070617.pdf https://www.oracle.com/assets/technology-price-list-070617.p...
  - zihotki 4y ago
    If you think from a different perspective that may be not reasonable. Consider a company that has multiple sources of income. One of the sources uses Akka and brings only, for example, 2.5 million a year. And now the expenses of running it will grow considerably, it may even become on the verge of sustainability because total income of the company is more than $25 million. It's not very reasonable in this case. That's why usually vendors have different plans to choose from.

by ccleve 4y ago

xani_ 4y ago

You can buy a hell lot more computing at 2k/vCPU to offset performance tho. And hiring a consultant for few months to fix your performance problems is also a hell lot cheaper than paying that much per core, forever. > Akka and their larger customers will make it work. The purpose of this license change is to give Akka the ability to get their customers to the table in the first place. Translation: They depend on our software enough that the rewrite is no alternative, they don't have enough onboard talent to fork it, and they have enough money to pay the price.

duskwuff 4y ago

> First, if you're running it on an 8-core server, that's $16k per year, which is about what many companies are paying for an enterprise support contract. Which is exactly why this is so unreasonable. The minimum spend for the "standard" license is 40 cores -- which means you're paying at least $80k/yr for a support contract which won't even assign you an account manager or guarantee a response any faster than "4 business days" (yes, really). And as you scale up, it only gets more expensive, and you don't get anything more for your money.

ccleve 4y ago
I did not see the part about the minimum spend. You're right; they'll probably run into significant resistance on that from the smaller customers.

tsss 4y ago

An 8-core server? Please. Just my team uses 70 vCores (peak) in our Kubernetes cluster. Without a custom licensing agreement that's $140k/year. The whole company is bound to pay well over $500k/year. Furthermore, most people here (as usual) seem to be completely ignorant about what Akka is. The vast majority of Akka users only ever interact with Akka through other libraries that depend on it: Akka-HTTP, Akka-Streams, Alpakka Connectors, etc. Hardly anyone actually uses Akka actors directly, the Akka Cluster platform or recently implemented distributed programming features (like Akka persistence) that makes up the business model of Lightbend. It's essentially a runtime system; an implementation detail. It's no surprise that none of these users ever make contributions back to a software that is so far removed from business code.

res0nat0r 4y ago
Since they aren't charging any companies that make less than $25 million a year this sounds reasonable. Most folks here don't seem to grasp the cost of most enterprise software, Oracle has been charging 10x this for decades now. https://www.oracle.com/assets/technology-price-list-070617.pdf https://www.oracle.com/assets/technology-price-list-070617.p...
- zihotki 4y ago
  If you think from a different perspective that may be not reasonable. Consider a company that has multiple sources of income. One of the sources uses Akka and brings only, for example, 2.5 million a year. And now the expenses of running it will grow considerably, it may even become on the verge of sustainability because total income of the company is more than $25 million. It's not very reasonable in this case. That's why usually vendors have different plans to choose from.