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RethinkDB Postmortem

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Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#4

Post by redslazer »

I always liked the concept of rethink db and I tried to get started with it a couple of times but in the end I just wanted to get my project(s) out of the door as quickly as possible.

This to me explains the massive success and quick rise of things like redis, mongodb etc. Sure the defaults are insecure but they work and they work immediately.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#5

Post by StavrosK »

I don't know, my personal opinion was that RethinkDB had its head on straight, MongoDB is garbage and still neither is so much better than PostgreSQL that I will switch away from it.

Postgres is the default datastore (because schemas are awesome) for me, and I haven't had a use case yet where I needed something that Postgres wouldn't do. Maybe if you have a very specific need, you'd reach for another datastore (come to think of it, I have successfully used Cassandra for multi-DC deployments of a distributed read-only store), but that's not the norm for me.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#6

Post by sytse »

hkailahi wrote: post #2

I'm surprised there are no comments here, this is the best thing I've seen on HN in a while.

I agree, let me take a stab at starting the conversation.

First of all, huge respect to Slava for this writeup. Having your startup fail is hard and it is not the time you want to blog about it. RethinkDB going broke was a sad thing to see for me, I can't imagine how it felt for him.

I think the analysis of the two root causes (hard market, focus on the wrong metrics) is accurate. It is very sad to see that in the end correctness doesn't win the day, not even for databases.

Since I run a startup too I can't help but apply his criteria to GitLab.

Good metrics to focus on:

1. Timely arrival => we try to ship great features every month on the 22nd, something that both our users https://twitter.com/PragTob/statuses/767777202045915136 and the parody account likely run by our competitors employees agree on https://twitter.com/gitlabceohere/status/768440048802947073

2. Palpable speed => we're doing OK on self hosted, really bad on GitLab.com (fixes are in https://gitlab.com/gitlab-com/infrastructure/issues/947 ). If you look beyond latency but to workflow we're doing great in integrating various parts of the process https://about.gitlab.com/2016/11/14/idea-to-production/

3. A use case => we're making GitLab an integrated tool with a broad scope https://about.gitlab.com/direction/#scope A good way to develop software from idea to production.

I hope the above list doesn't come across as pretentious. I welcome pushback and the opportunity to talk more about the OP.

I think the OP premise that it is hard to make money in the cloud is accurate. We're spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to make GitLab.com run and revenue takes a long time to grow. Selling on-premises software products has higher margins than a service.

BTW I appreciate the shoutout to GitLab as one of the five exceptions that are doing well in the open source developer market.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#7

Post by karlunho »

There is bigger market forces that isn't being considered here - namely that the entire database as a service margins have been nearly driving down to zero by AWS. Why do you think firebase had to sellout to Google ? Why did Parse shut down ? Simply because the big cloud vendors figured out that providing paas services at nearly the cost of the infrastructure will win them even more compute workloads which is the real money maker (especially if your are reducing your computer pricing slower than Moore's law)

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#8

Post by dboreham »

StavrosK wrote: post #5

I don't know, my personal opinion was that RethinkDB had its head on straight, MongoDB is garbage and still neither is so much better than PostgreSQL that I will switch away from it. Postgres is the default datastore (because schemas are awesome) for me, and I haven't had a use case yet where I needed something that Postgres wouldn't do. Maybe if you have a very specific need, you'd reach for another datastore (come…

Rethink, Mongo et al are scalable (at the expense of some ACID). PG is certainly a good DB (I use it in production) but it is at heart a traditional RDBMS - not designed for scalability. Apples vs Pears..

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#9

Post by Perceptes »

I really appreciate the deep introspection in this post. We can all learn a lot from it. I'm one of the (possible minority) of HN users that doesn't care about startups and business, so for me the takeaway was about how choosing quality and correctness over speed works out in the real world. It seems that you really can't take the idealist approach to quality that RethinkDB took. The world just isn't willing to wait, and it's not willing to take the time to understand a system and to see how clearly it distinguishes itself from the alternatives. Our decisions are driven by speed. Our culture is "always be shipping." But part of the result of this is that all our software is riddled with bugs and usability issues. Even the most basic functionality of our computers fail all the time, all the way down the stack. It's depressing that a really solid, honest attempt to produce extremely high quality software like RethinkDB can't survive in part because of these things.

Re: RethinkDB Postmortem

#10

Post by bcantrill »

Fascinating read, albeit a sad one: I love RethinkDB, and use it personally every day in our particular production deployment.[1] But -- and to Slava's point -- we didn't/don't/wouldn't pay for it, and in that regard, we were part of the problem. That said, the constraint on that particular problem was that it had to be open source, and if it couldn't have been RethinkDB, it would have been some other open source database -- proprietary software is a non-option for that use case (or indeed, for any of our use cases).

So I feel Slava's pain (and feel somewhat culpable as a user of RethinkDB), but I don't entirely agree with the analysis. Yes, infrastructure is a brutal space because it has been so thoroughly disrupted by open source -- but the dominance of AWS shows that open source can absolutely be monetized (just that it must be monetized as a service). Indeed, right now, I would love to deploy a RethinkDB-based service -- and if the company still existed, we (and by "we" I mean "we Samsung", not "we Joyent"[2]) would potentially be in a serious business conversation about what a supported, large-scale deployment would look like. Actually, that's not entirely true, and it leads to me to one thing that Slava didn't mention. While it kills me to bring it up, it does represent the single greatest impediment I have personally found to deep, mainstream, enterprise adoption of RethinkDB: its use of the AGPL. Anyone who has been part of a serious due diligence knows that the GPL alone is toxic to much of the enterprise world -- and the GPL is a buttoned-down corporate stooge compared to the virulent, ill-defined, never-tested AGPL. The AGPL is a complete non-starter for any purpose, and while I appreciate why the AGPL was selected by RethinkDB (and very much appreciate the explicit riders that RethinkDB put on it to make clear what it did and didn't apply to), the reality is that no one -- absolutely no one -- has built a business on AGPL software and it seems vanishingly unlikely that anyone ever will.

I still use RethinkDB and still intend to -- and I still harbor hope (crazily?) that whatever entity that owns the IP will see fit to relicense it to something that is palatable to the kind of people who care about their data. I actually believe that a business can be built on the technology -- which, to Slava's points, I have found to be delightfully sound in both design and implementation. And that RethinkDB is open source means -- for us, anyway -- it will continue to live on, despite the unfortunate demise of its corporate vessel (AGPL or no). That said, I would love to have a lot more company -- here's hoping that we see RethinkDB relicensed and a thriving business behind it!

[1] https://github.com/joyent/manta-thoth

[2] https://www.joyent.com/blog/samsung-acquires-joyent-a-ctos-p...

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