M3DB, a distributed timeseries database
1–10 of 138 posts
Re: M3DB, a distributed timeseries database
#2Uber has started many projects that ended up getting open sourced. And many of them are now either abandoned or on life support. H3 comes to mind as something we almost ended up using but luckily avoided.
These open-sourcings seem a bit like PR pieces with no guarantees of any support or evolution after being published.
Re: M3DB, a distributed timeseries database
#3Uber has started many projects that ended up getting open sourced. And many of them are now either abandoned or on life support. H3 comes to mind as something we almost ended up using but luckily avoided. These open-sourcings seem a bit like PR pieces with no guarantees of any support or evolution after being published.
Why do you consider H3 to be on life support? It's basically a finished spec with actively developed implementations. https://github.com/uber/h3
Re: M3DB, a distributed timeseries database
#4Uber has started many projects that ended up getting open sourced. And many of them are now either abandoned or on life support. H3 comes to mind as something we almost ended up using but luckily avoided. These open-sourcings seem a bit like PR pieces with no guarantees of any support or evolution after being published.
Chronosphere, a startup founded by two of the early M3 engineers, just raised 11 million dollars to build a monitoring platform based around M3DB: https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/05/chronosphere-launches-with...
Uber also uses M3DB extensively internally and the project is nowhere near being abandoned or on life support: https://github.com/m3db/m3/commits/master
Re: M3DB, a distributed timeseries database
#5Uber has started many projects that ended up getting open sourced. And many of them are now either abandoned or on life support. H3 comes to mind as something we almost ended up using but luckily avoided. These open-sourcings seem a bit like PR pieces with no guarantees of any support or evolution after being published.
It's opensource. Why should Uber give any guarantees? They are not in the business of selling software.
Unless Uber is actively blocking contributions, it's not Uber's fault if no community formed around something they opensourced.
As for this being a PR piece, they could have achieved the same with just a detailed blog post and no code. It looks like a expensive PR piece if they have to opensource work that took probably hundreds of development hours.
Re: M3DB, a distributed timeseries database
#6Uber has started many projects that ended up getting open sourced. And many of them are now either abandoned or on life support. H3 comes to mind as something we almost ended up using but luckily avoided. These open-sourcings seem a bit like PR pieces with no guarantees of any support or evolution after being published.
It's opensource. Why should Uber give any guarantees? They are not in the business of selling software. Unless Uber is actively blocking contributions, it's not Uber's fault if no community formed around something they opensourced. As for this being a PR piece, they could have achieved the same with just a detailed blog post and no code. It looks like a expensive PR piece if they have to opensource work that took pro…
I agree with everything you say.
But without any certainty around the roadmap, support, and longterm commitment by Uber to maintain these projects, they're nothing more than interesting repos amongst a sea of interesting repos.
The way Uber brands them suggests that they're suitable for use in production environments, but so far that hasn't been the case with anything they open sourced outside a narrow envelope that resembles their own operating model. Maybe this project will set a new trend, but so far nothing they put out gained any traction or became suitable for general purpose production use. In that regard, H3 and their other projects have remained at the level of decent 'show HN' pieces rather than something you'd ever use professionally. In other words, marketing.
Based on previous news coming out e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20931644
It seems like Uber had too big of an engineering department with too little work to do, so they started reinventing wheels. Which is cool if they're willing to support them in the long term, but so far that hasn't proven to be the case.
Re: M3DB, a distributed timeseries database
#7Thanks for the interest, I just did a talk at FOSDEM a few weeks ago on the subject of querying over large datasets that M3DB can warehouse and query in real-time here:
Slides https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/m3db/attachments/audi...
Re: M3DB, a distributed timeseries database
#8Uber has started many projects that ended up getting open sourced. And many of them are now either abandoned or on life support. H3 comes to mind as something we almost ended up using but luckily avoided. These open-sourcings seem a bit like PR pieces with no guarantees of any support or evolution after being published.
It's opensource. Why should Uber give any guarantees? They are not in the business of selling software. Unless Uber is actively blocking contributions, it's not Uber's fault if no community formed around something they opensourced. As for this being a PR piece, they could have achieved the same with just a detailed blog post and no code. It looks like a expensive PR piece if they have to opensource work that took pro…
> Why should Uber give any guarantees?
First, "guarantee" is the wrong word to take too literally here. Depending on how you want to look at it, there are no guarantees, even with guarantees.
But looked at more loosely, answering that is really Uber's responsibility. Why did they release it? If it is just a PR release, fire-and-forget works fine for that.
If they want to see wider adoption outside of their firm, there are some fairly obvious things they should do to foster that. Sometimes you release just the right thing at just the right time and everyone else does your evangelism and support work for you, but it is much more normal for your next great thing to take a while to build a user base.
Re: M3DB, a distributed timeseries database
#9Does "Time Series Database" mean anything technical, or is this just some Uber marketing? In statistics, time series has a technical meaning.
Re: M3DB, a distributed timeseries database
#10I get Uber is huge. But honestly, there was nothing out there that could fulfill there use case? Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Influx, etc.? I might be completely wrong, but I just highly doubt that.