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AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

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Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#41

Post by jimmychangas »

pjc50 wrote: post #14

Two comments: Firstly, the discussion at the front about the music industry is quite insightful, but I'd go further - they didn't want to sell convenience at first. Used to the physical embodiment of recordings rather than the de-materialized reality of digital music, they spent years working on mandated inconvenience through DRM and other legal actions. Always remember that if the music industry had won unopposed yo…

> there's no intrinsic reason that the same company that gives away labour as OSS should also make the best complements to that OSS

There are no guarantees that they will provide the best complements to their own product, but the common sense is that they will. From a marketing perspective, I think it makes complete sense, especially when selling to enterprise customers.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#42

Post by pbalau »

StriverGuy wrote: post #35
matwood wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To put it succinctly, Red Hat doesn't sell Linux, they sell expertise in Linux.

Arguable this is what MongoDB, Inc. sells as well. A big part of their package for enterprise clients is optimization and consulting services.

Then they should be as successful as RedHat. Or maybe their niche is too small and the people in that niche don't need the consulting part.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#43

Post by jhanschoo »

donatj wrote: post #11

Honestly at this point I would rather use Closed Source software than Open Source that isn’t “Free as in Speech”. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. At least closed source is honest about its intentions. I use Free Software not because the price, but rather so I can be Free. So I can know I am free to use software I develop with it in whatever way I want. I find the push to market open source by limiting it’s use one o…

The open source that you call "isn't free as in speech" is actually Free Software. You are able to develop with it in whatever way you want. The requirement is that whatever you develop is also Free Software and is distributed whenever it is used. This is what Stallman has in mind when he talks about free software. Your freedom to develop above free software developed by others cannot come at the cost of others' freedom to develop above your software that has enjoyed the fruits of said freedom.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#44

Post by geggam »

donatj wrote: post #11

Honestly at this point I would rather use Closed Source software than Open Source that isn’t “Free as in Speech”. It’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. At least closed source is honest about its intentions. I use Free Software not because the price, but rather so I can be Free. So I can know I am free to use software I develop with it in whatever way I want. I find the push to market open source by limiting it’s use one o…

So you prefer the BSD licensed software ?

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#45

Post by geggam »

sokoloff wrote: post #34
z3t4 wrote: post #16

How easy is it to migrate to or away from a cloud service like AWS ? I think the end-game for these cloud giants is to lock you in, so that you simply can't switch to a commodity provider.

When we embarked on our migration into AWS, we thought about this pretty carefully. There wasn't anything that we couldn't move in a year. That provides a sufficient backstop (IMO) to anything becoming untenable in the AWS ecosystem. Most everything could be moved in a handful of weeks of effort, or at least enough parts to achieve the reason to move. AWS is still in a battle for market share; I think they're extreme…

At scale you need to move out of the cloud. Once you hit a certain point there is no economic gain.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#46

Post by pwaivers »

Beltiras wrote: post #29

I don't see why big companies like Google, AWS and the like wouldn't fund open source development, precisely because they have realized great returns using those softwares to reap monetary benefit. If I were a CEO and my core business was built on OSS, I would allocate budget to help the projects used within my organization. It's just common sense to do so. Reality might be different but then that makes for some real…

I think the argument from this article is that the core business for AWS is not the OSS. Their core business is to provide "performance, scalability, and availability". So it is a financial reality that they can (and should) replace the software if they want to.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#47

Post by sokoloff »

geggam wrote: post #45
sokoloff wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we embarked on our migration into AWS, we thought about this pretty carefully. There wasn't anything that we couldn't move in a year. That provides a sufficient backstop (IMO) to anything becoming untenable in the AWS ecosystem. Most everything could be moved in a handful of weeks of effort, or at least enough parts to achieve the reason to move. AWS is still in a battle for market share; I think they're extreme…

At scale you need to move out of the cloud. Once you hit a certain point there is no economic gain.

That is almost surely true at extreme scale. The interesting question is whether that's true for 0.1%, 1%, or 5% of companies. (I think it's on the lower end of that range somewhere, provided the 5% scale cases are willing to be smart about their hybrid strategy.)

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#48

Post by hendzen »

nwhatt wrote: post #36

Why can't MongoDB can't compete with AWS? Aside from cloud vendor lock-in, and economies of scale that AWS has. Curious if anyone here has experience with hosting using Mongo's enterprise offering. The article makes the point that Amazon is targeting a lower version of the API, can't the enterprise version compete on features?

MongoDB is competing with AWS. Atlas actually runs on top of AWS - Mongo is capturing the spread between their per-instance charge and the AWS charge (or GCE/Azure). What this article ignores is that Atlas is actually competing quite well and has significant adoption. The people who run MongoDB are not dumb, they will try to turn the hosting in to a commodity before Amazon can turn the DB in to a commodity.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#49

Post by pjmlp »

reacweb wrote: post #32

When you give money to redhat, you buy insurance that if you encounter a problem, they will support you. It is expencive, but there is clearly a lot of work involved in producing new release. IMHO redhat deserves its money. When you give money to Oracle, you are financing lawyers who try to find the best way to make you pay more without improving the software.

There is lots of juice in Oracle SQL that even PostgreSQL is lacking.

GraalVM would never exist with weekend developers.

Top level JIT and almost non stoping GC algorithms don't get implementated with late nighters.

Re: AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source

#50

Post by meekins »

scaryclam wrote: post #25
z3t4 wrote: post #16

How easy is it to migrate to or away from a cloud service like AWS ? I think the end-game for these cloud giants is to lock you in, so that you simply can't switch to a commodity provider.

How you design your system will dictate how easy or hard it is to move. I've always been an advocate of making sure the design is agnostic to where it's running. Problems with moving start coming up if you've tied yourself tightly to specific services, or ways of working. That's not to say you shouldn't use those services, many are really very useful, just be aware of, and have a plan on how to move away from them (i…

This of course depends on how central the app you are building is to your business and how long lifespan you expect. If it's your core product and you expect a lifespan of > 5 years, not getting tied in with a single cloud vendor is smart. Usually that implies some kind of stack where the highest level of abstraction is a set of containers or VMs.

But when for example doing software consulting for a company whose core product and business is not software I personally advocate the completely opposite approach: embrace your cloud platform and use the services with biggest value-add (and coincidentally lock-in). PaaS-style services enable very small teams to deliver functionality very quickly and in a robust manner - and managed services allows for keeping them running very cost-efficiently.

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