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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

#81

Post by bpicolo »

zozbot123 wrote: post #65
matwood wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree. It's important to point out specifically that many companies are paying for OSS with developer time instead of money. IMO, that is better than money and fits the OSS ethos.

> IMO, that is better than money IMO, it's not. SF developer time is hella expensive, and OSS projects can hire developers on their own, somewhere cheaper. Where a software company can help OSS cheaply and effectively is by providing support for interoperability with their own business area, and by relicensing their existing , non-core-business IP under favorable terms.

> OSS projects can hire developers on their own, somewhere cheaper

A lot of the bigger OSS projects require an expertise you're not going to find outside of megacorps, because they have internal scale/process problems/otherwise that necessitate interesting problem solving

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

#82

Post by scarface74 »

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?

Why can't MongoDB can't compete with AWS? Aside from cloud vendor lock-in, and economies of scale that AWS has.

That’s kind of the point. If you want a managed service, Mongo can’t compete at the scale of AWS.

And by definition, if AWS is offering the same API, there is no “cloud vendor lock in”.

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

#83

Post by nik736 »

sokoloff wrote: post #58
gbear605 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe Netflix and Apple use AWS, so I’m not so sure about that.

Netflix runs their application on AWS. They do not stream out of AWS (because AWS bandwidth is too expensive for that application).

It's not only about cost. Networking is complex and especially for streaming companies.

1.) They need to know which pipes (to which carriers) are used at what percentage

2.) Be able to upgrade those pipes as they please

3.) Be able to cache content locally with those carriers/ISPs

All of those 3 points are not really possible with AWS.

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

#84

Post by count »

lwf wrote: post #69
BrentOzar wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> These companies are some of the biggest contributors to open source. I wouldn't expect AWS to make a lot of code contributions to MongoDB when they've built something else that's 3.6 compatible, though. It's not like they're going to make contributions to a new, incompatible version of MongoDB. They've already made the call to fork. I agree with what you're saying about other products, but not this particular case.

It isn't a fork, it's an entirely new database that implements the same API. c.f. https://twitter.com/nathankpeck/status/1083385031207387136 from someone at AWS DevRel. There's nothing about Mongo's license that's super relevant here -- it's a similar situation to other cloud providers offering "S3"- or "EC2"-compatible APIs. (IANAL, but AIUI API copyright/fair-use isn't entirely settled in the US, Oracle v. Google n…

Also important is the API that AWS is compatible with was itself part of the OSS licensed code of an old version of mongo. Oracle vs. Google is different as Java was never OSS licensed.

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

#85

Post by scarface74 »

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.

Despite the dreams of techies, companies rarely change their underlying infrastructure. You’re always locked in to your infrastructure choices without a lot of pain and the upside is usually not worth it.

No, the company you work for is not going to get rid of their million dollar Oracle installation either and move to Postgres just because you told the CTO that you used the Repositiry Pattern and abstracted your database logic from the underlying database.

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

#86

Post by scarface74 »

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.

Tell that to Netflix....

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

#87

Post by mooreds »

geggam wrote: post #63
sokoloff wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.)

Was at a startup around 2k nodes in AWS. Bill was over 400K on average a month. When purchasing RI I saw 800K a month.

> When purchasing RI I saw 800K a month.

I don't understand. Can you please clarify?

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

#88

Post by Thaxll »

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.

This is wrong, most companies at scale use the cloud nowdays, the operational cost + expertise you need to replicate those cloud platforms is huge.

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

#89

Post by benologist »

Amazon has for years been stealing from merchants on their platform and AWS is just another part of their platform. They are everything we caution people against when they depend on a single API like being a superfluous Twitter client getting crushed, just a much, much larger API.

In Mongo's unfortunate case they couldn't stop people from deploying to EC2 before Amazon determined it was worth stealing, but it doesn't even have to be software you use on EC2 it can be your software too.

They copy products from third party vendors selling on Amazon -

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-27/amazon-s-...

http://fortune.com/2016/04/20/amazon-copies-merchants/

They even copy SaaS hosted on AWS if the number are good -

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/03/08/amazon_copies_partn...

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

#90

Post by Proven »

> It’s hard to not be sympathetic to MongoDB Inc. and Redis Labs: both spent a lot of money and effort building their products, and now Amazon is making money off of them.

I disagree.

Many early adopters got on board with MongoDB because the DB was released under a permissive open source license. Later some of them became hostages to it.

The second reason is no one forced the two to develop the software and do business that way.

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