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Elastic files for an IPO

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Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#71

Post by munk-a »

ncmncm wrote: post #67
fh973 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a data point for how well the open source business model works? Or are they just unnecessarily bloated?

If you aren't incurring losses, it means you are throwing away potential income by growing too slowly, and inviting competitors to take up the slack. In case of a market or tech hiccup, you might find yourself without "sufficient cash flow", and collapse, but that would be the investors' problem. The investors are assumed to be able to absorb the loss and disappointment without undue discomfort, and so they are. Risk…

I understand a lot of silicon valley is funded in this manner right now but please re-read this command and realize how silly it is. It's proper to say that taking a loss for long term gain is sometimes the right measured decision but saying that failing to lose money constantly is a failure is just ridiculous.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#72

Post by tschellenbach »

burnmaster wrote: post #66
calcsam wrote: post #37

This is an extremely solid financial statement. $150M in revenue, growing ~100% per year; I'd project a valuation between $3B and $4B. Twilio, Mulesoft, and MongoDB are probably the best comparables here -- open-source and dev-tools based SaaS IPOs. All of these were very successful at IPO and afterwards, and even compared to these, Elastic looks great. * They're growing at almost 100% per year which is incredible. T…

I see several responses that mention MongoDB for purposes of comparison and seem to conclude Elasticsearch fares favorably. It should be noted: [1] Unlike MongoDB (which is a ground-up build), Elasticsearch is basically an API layer on top of Apache Lucene. This is relevant because they haven't built and don't maintain, control, or own the source of their primary IP. [2] Unlike MongoDB (General Purpose) Elasticsearch…

Lucene is open source, Mongo is open source. It's the same approach.

Elastic is used for search, log analysis and analytics.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#73

Post by busterarm »

mooreds wrote: post #53
busterarm wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Elastic Cloud runs in either AWS or GCP. You get to choose but it's just between those. Unless you mean you were using AWS's ElasticSearch service... which is known to not be all that great. You could build ES clusters on AWS directly on EC2 and it would be cheaper than Cloud, unless what you're really looking for is that support contract. I spent a few months of my life learning ES inside and out and would choo…

> You could build ES clusters on AWS directly on EC2 and it would be cheaper than Cloud, unless what you're really looking for is that support contract. Or you are willing to trade money for dev time. Setting up and running the ES cluster on EC2 will take time and energy (source, I did it ). Whereas setting up the ES cluster on either the Elastic Search hosted service or AWS ElasticSearch is really just clicking some…

I can largely agree with the last statement. The problem I find with the hosted services is that people just tend to throw data at it without really knowing anything about cluster/node/shard performance. This typically blows up in their face at some point and even though Elastic Cloud has nice sliders in place for spend-more-money, they still have to go through the rebalancing pains (if they didn't write-lock the cluster outright). That should never happen.

If you have strictly time-series data and are willing to make compromises around retention window, hosted elasticsearch is an easy conclusion. Invariably though, I find that where performance is a real concern, you have to carefully plan what data you're indexing and that requires operations knowledge around elasticsearch. At that point you almost might as well host it yourself anyway.

Also if X-Pack was something I _had_ to have, and tbh there are free alternatives for all of its good features, I would consider Elastic Cloud.

I'm even a customer of theirs on some clusters, but lackluster support and pushy upselling experiences have made me want to move out of it.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#74

Post by busterarm »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #32
hendzen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are key differences between MongoDB and Elastic. MongoDB (the company), has been very strategic about defending themselves from Amazon. Likely due to the AGPL licensing on MongoDB (the database), Amazon doesn't offer a hosted MongoDB - you have to buy MongoDB Atlas which runs on multiple cloud providers, including AWS, GCP and Azure. Coincidentally, Atlas subscriptions are the fastest growing part of MongoDB In…

> Elastic (Apache licensed) has actually had their lunch eaten by Amazon to a much larger degree. Many businesses are purchasing hosted ES instances directly from Amazon via Amazon Elasticsearch service. The problem is bad enough that Elastic Inc had to write a marketing blog post about it [0]. Also the reason Redis Labs made the controversial decision to change their licensing (and they reference Elastic in it) [1].…

A big part of it is Elastic's fuckup.

It's a big deal for a lot of companies to be able to pay the cloud bill in one place. Elastic used to provide the availability to pay for the Elastic cloud subscription through AWS' Marketplace. Elastic stopped this when they changed their pricing at the beginning of 2017 and we (my last employer) were negotiating a contract with them at the time. AWS billing was a hard requirement for us because it made it a lot easier on us from the finance side. We walked and I know a lot of others who did too.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#75

Post by bratao »

For anyone that for any reason is looking for an alternative to ElasticSearch/Solr: Try Vespa.ai

The feature of live node removing/adding alone made my life so much easier. The performance and Machine Learning ranking is the icing on the cake!

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#76

Post by linkmotif »

bratao wrote: post #75

For anyone that for any reason is looking for an alternative to ElasticSearch/Solr: Try Vespa.ai The feature of live node removing/adding alone made my life so much easier. The performance and Machine Learning ranking is the icing on the cake!

You mean there’s no refresh delay?

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#77

Post by toomuchtodo »

busterarm wrote: post #74
toomuchtodo wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Elastic (Apache licensed) has actually had their lunch eaten by Amazon to a much larger degree. Many businesses are purchasing hosted ES instances directly from Amazon via Amazon Elasticsearch service. The problem is bad enough that Elastic Inc had to write a marketing blog post about it [0]. Also the reason Redis Labs made the controversial decision to change their licensing (and they reference Elastic in it) [1].…

A big part of it is Elastic's fuckup. It's a big deal for a lot of companies to be able to pay the cloud bill in one place. Elastic used to provide the availability to pay for the Elastic cloud subscription through AWS' Marketplace. Elastic stopped this when they changed their pricing at the beginning of 2017 and we (my last employer) were negotiating a contract with them at the time. AWS billing was a hard requireme…

It’s not Elastic’s fault your accounts payable process is deficient.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#78

Post by AznHisoka »

burnmaster wrote: post #66
calcsam wrote: post #37

This is an extremely solid financial statement. $150M in revenue, growing ~100% per year; I'd project a valuation between $3B and $4B. Twilio, Mulesoft, and MongoDB are probably the best comparables here -- open-source and dev-tools based SaaS IPOs. All of these were very successful at IPO and afterwards, and even compared to these, Elastic looks great. * They're growing at almost 100% per year which is incredible. T…

I see several responses that mention MongoDB for purposes of comparison and seem to conclude Elasticsearch fares favorably. It should be noted: [1] Unlike MongoDB (which is a ground-up build), Elasticsearch is basically an API layer on top of Apache Lucene. This is relevant because they haven't built and don't maintain, control, or own the source of their primary IP. [2] Unlike MongoDB (General Purpose) Elasticsearch…

Elasticsearch is much more than a search engine.

Lots of people use it for analytics (checkout their aggregation/time series queries) as well as analyzing huge logs. Some people are starting to use it for machine learning use cases too.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#79

Post by aisofteng »

Fiahil wrote: post #26
d4l3k wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, both MongoDB and Elasticsearch have had serious issues as pointed out via the Jepsen tests. https://aphyr.com/posts/317-jepsen-elasticsearch https://aphyr.com/posts/323-jepsen-elasticsearch-1-5-0 Though, all those issues have been fixed for both MongoDB and Elasticsearch so it's not necessarily fair to judge them based off past performance. https://www.elastic.co/guide/en/elasticsearch/resiliency/cur... h…

These jepsen tests cover elasticsearch 1.5, a large number of issues have been progressively fixed. We're now at ES 6

Note that 3 and 4 were skipped; ES 2 was followed by ES 6.

Re: Elastic files for an IPO

#80

Post by itronitron »

burnmaster wrote: post #66
calcsam wrote: post #37

This is an extremely solid financial statement. $150M in revenue, growing ~100% per year; I'd project a valuation between $3B and $4B. Twilio, Mulesoft, and MongoDB are probably the best comparables here -- open-source and dev-tools based SaaS IPOs. All of these were very successful at IPO and afterwards, and even compared to these, Elastic looks great. * They're growing at almost 100% per year which is incredible. T…

I see several responses that mention MongoDB for purposes of comparison and seem to conclude Elasticsearch fares favorably. It should be noted: [1] Unlike MongoDB (which is a ground-up build), Elasticsearch is basically an API layer on top of Apache Lucene. This is relevant because they haven't built and don't maintain, control, or own the source of their primary IP. [2] Unlike MongoDB (General Purpose) Elasticsearch…

At this point Elastic is a lot more than a wrapper around Lucene/Solr as they have acquired many companies to build out their product offerings. That isn't necessarily a good thing, in my opinion they need to trim down their product from a hodgepodge of APIs to something that can be more easily put to use. The amount of work involved with getting something useful out is about the same that it would take to build a custom solution off Lucene/Solr.
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