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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

#191

Post by jillesvangurp »

The economic reality of building software is that it is enormously expensive. Yes, you could develop your own operating system, compiler, UI frameworks, databases, etc. Or you could use something that already exists and works and focus on creating something new instead. You'll never get around to building something new if you first have to reinvent countless wheels.

That's why there are only a handful of widely used operating systems, many of which are Linux based at this point and all of which depend on many small OSS components. It just takes too much effort to get to the same level of functionality. The two notable exceptions are Apple and Microsoft that both choose to maintain their decades long investments in their respective software stacks. Even Microsoft has recently joined the club and is now doing open source openly. Sound economics and it has done wonders for their valuation.

Another reality with software is that its value decreases over time. It inevitably becomes a commodity. Design, algorithms, and successful features find their way to competing products and inevitably one of them gets distributed under a very permissive license. As that happens, the way to differentiate and stay valuable (and relevant) is to improve what you do, how you do it, and how well you do it.

This is the economic problem MongoDB is facing: their added value is tanking and they felt they needed to make their already quite restrictive license even less permissive to be able to get more revenue from their users. This makes the product harder to use commercially unless you pay (which is intentional). However, this causes people to look for alternative solutions and causes many of them to find their way to competing products.

The predictable result: several competing products now offer more or less drop in replacement functionality with most or all of the technical features that made MongoDB so cool just a few years ago. Amazon just capitalized on that by launching their own (closed source) product.

The long term economic success of OSS is tied to its development community. This requires ongoing investments to happen. An OSS community is usually not a single company that owns the software but the collective of users and developers of the software that together 'own' the software and derive value from it. There are certain types of software projects out there that are so essential to so many companies that they thrive for decades and are pushed forward by companies and people pooling resources through donations, active contributions, etc.

This requires a pragmatic attitude to licensing. We just saw frenemies Google and MS join forces around chrome. That is not charity: they both have a big enough economic stake in that project to put their differences aside (which are considerable). The licenses are key to facilitating such communities between mutually distrusting entities like that. It fundamentally has to facilitate the software can be used freely by anyone; that is the basis for collaboration.

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

#192

Post by ojosilva »

scarface74 wrote: post #184
houseofzeus wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Docker are actually an example of a pattern, one that also impacts MongoDB and many other companies. That pattern is that they intentionally branded the product and the project with the same name (in this case Docker) to help with slipstreaming on the community mindshare they were building. The flip side of that which eventually comes home to roost though is that it means the two are easily confused . If I'm a custom…

I don't see anything Mongo could have done differently. Even if Mongo were completely proprietary software, it wouldn't have affected AWS. They didn't use Mongo's code just emulated their API. That's basically the same thing that kicked off the entire PC industry -- clean room cloning BIOS.

Emulating a propietary API would open up the door to litigation with uncertain outcome, generating distrust and bad press for Amazon. So not the same.

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

#193

Post by merlynn »

duggan wrote: post #54
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?

Other than multi-document transactions, many of the changes to MongoDB since 3.6 are to do with performance and scaling - this is AWS' bread and butter. Something to consider is how many applications depends on cutting edge database features. Developers often consider a database an object persistence mechanism whose details are to be tidied away. See, for example, the emphasis on database portability in ORMs. MongoDB…

In the spirit of complete transparency, I work at MongoDB. Depending on users' specific needs and the features of MongoDB they use, the differences could go quite a bit further than 'just' support. Some of the important differences to keep in mind include regional availability and approaches to resiliency (Atlas allows you to scale beyond a single node and offers multi-region clusters; DocumentDB limits you to a single primary), role-based access control (DocumentDB currently only supports user that has full access to all databases in a cluster; MongoDB allows fine-grained control), freedom from vendor lock-in (With MongoDB you can always choose to host your own clusters whereas DocumentDB does not afford you this option). These are only a few of the differences between the hosting platforms, on top of that, you would, of course, be limited to an incomplete set of features (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/documentdb/latest/developerguide...) compared to MongoDB 3.6 and you would be missing out on improvements available in MongoDB 4.0 and future versions.

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

#194

Post by merlynn »

scarface74 wrote: post #82
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”.

MongoDB certainly can compete at scale with AWS with MongoDB Atlas - Managed Database as a Service.

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

#195

Post by merlynn »

bobm_kite9 wrote: post #121

I'll be interested to see what Jepsen[1] makes of this. MongoDB traditionally lost a lot of data when there was a split-brain in the network. According to the post, AWS is a re-implementation of MongoDB v3. Will Amazon's implementation fare any better? [1]: https://aphyr.com/posts/284-call-me-maybe-mongodb

Michael here from MongoDB - I can't answer your question about DocumentDB and Jepsen, but there is a more recent analysis from Jepsen: https://jepsen.io/analyses/mongodb-3-4-0-rc3. DocumentDB is built on Aurora, so the architecture is completely different.

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

#196

Post by merlynn »

sebringj wrote: post #147

So its like Mongo is being eaten by AWS in terms of its service offerings after it gains mindshare as DocumentDB is essentially a swap-out replacement for larger companies. That somehow smells to me as it erodes funding from its foundation in some way. I don't know.

Michael here from MongoDB - We're currently still running tests on users ability to change from MongoDB to DocumentDB. It may not be quite as simple as exporting and reimporting the data. Many features present in MongoDB 3.6 do not work in DocumentDB (https://docs.aws.amazon.com/documentdb/latest/developerguide...). Preliminary test results show that DocumenDB is closer to MongoDB 2.0 in its features (with some exceptions). That means people that choose to switch over will have to find workarounds and change their code to work with DocumentDB. We'll be releasing our analysis on this soon with more information.

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

#197

Post by scarface74 »

merlynn wrote: post #194
scarface74 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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”.

MongoDB certainly can compete at scale with AWS with MongoDB Atlas - Managed Database as a Service.

By hosting on AWS, Azure, and GCP...

And even then they don’t host your database in your own VPC which is a big deal to some companies.

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

#198

Post by scarface74 »

ojosilva wrote: post #192
scarface74 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see anything Mongo could have done differently. Even if Mongo were completely proprietary software, it wouldn't have affected AWS. They didn't use Mongo's code just emulated their API. That's basically the same thing that kicked off the entire PC industry -- clean room cloning BIOS.

Emulating a propietary API would open up the door to litigation with uncertain outcome, generating distrust and bad press for Amazon. So not the same.

The original PC BIOS was also proprietary.

Google did the same thing with Java. It’s up in the air how that will turn out.

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

#199

Post by merlynn »

Michael from MongoDB here. Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are certainly big players in this field, and common wisdom is that they are best qualified to scale, but in this case, we have a clear counterexample. DocumentDB clusters are limited to a single region of AWS. MongoDB Atlas clusters can span the entire globe with low-latency reads and writes in multiple regions. In terms of pricing, DocumentDB is cheaper when you choose to go with 2 instances. AWS achieves this by shifting high availability to the storage layer which in turn means that any failover could require between 1 and 2 minutes to happen - this compares to seconds that this would take with MongoDB Atlas. If you go with the default DocumentDB configuration and use 3 instances you end up paying a premium between 20-35%. With this in mind, it really depends on your use case whether DocumentDB ends up being cheaper for you. In terms of reliability and the hosting service is global, Atlas currently outperforms DocumentDB.

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

#200

Post by fwiw1 »

tfolbrecht wrote: post #163
alittletooraph wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article mentions that MongoDB already has its own hosted database service, Atlas.

It does, I've used it, I even have the socks, but it's a managed Database product. It's not equivalent to Firebase, AWS Lightsail, Digital Ocean One-click, etc. So a new MERN developer isn't going to gravitate toward that. It's more like AWS RDS for MongoDB.

https://www.mongodb.com/cloud/stitch
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