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They are brave regardless. Elastic is not only database engine but whole ecosystem. Drivers, tooling, existing code, data pipelines, documentation and tutorials. Long terms keeping with elastic will be challenging to say at least.
I do not get why people are coming down on AWS here. Elastic made the software available under the Apache License. That gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that. AWS contributes improvements to the project. This is just about Elastic and their business model. They could have not made it open source and it probably just would not have been…
There is something wrong in what amazon is doing. Not legally, but morally. A giant chooses to use your open source software and undercut you by bundling it with other offerings they have. At the minimum they should collaborate with the open source devs or donate to the project.
BTW, not that it's super relevant but the narrative that Amazon is driving Elastic bankrupt is farcical. Elastic pulls in $500MM in revenue and is valued at $15B+. Elastic's doing fine.
Note: One thing Amazon did do that was unethical was claim that they had "collaborated with Elastic" when they announced AWS Elasticsearch long ago. That is indefensible. But there is nothing wrong with them forking.
>Instead, new versions of the software will be offered under the Elastic License (which limits how it can be used) or the Server Side Public License (which has requirements that make it unacceptable to many in the open source community). I'm a bit out of the loop here, can someone please tell me why Elastic decided to enact this seemingly Anti-OSS license?
Elastic's business model is "make + distribute ElasticSearch for free, then offer hosted ES for money." AWS (among others) offers hosted ElasticSearch as well - Elastic feels this isn't fair, variously because: AWS may have violated trademark by calling theirs "Amazon Elasticsearch Service", or because AWS doesn't contribute enough to the open source development of ElasticSearch, or one of a few other grievances. So they're changing their license to one that protects against this sort of "abuse" of the Apache license.
The less charitable version is that since Elastic's business model revolves around selling hosted ElasticSearch and AWS is outcompeting them there, they're switching to an "Open Source, but you're not allowed to do that anymore" license. But because Elastic values the goodwill they get from being "open source," they're trying to convince the world that this is a principled, moral stance instead of a run-of-the-mill self-interested decision to make their business more viable.
And I, for sure, will never use them. The AWS version of ES has been abysmal- it’s only saving grace is that it’s “in the ecosystem”- I was convinced by an AWS zealot on my team. Never again.
I send about 100GB a day to Amazon ES and it works fine. I used to maintain ES 2.x and 5.x on my own and it was more work for me personally at a slight cost savings. What has been abysmal for you? Maybe your use case is more advanced than ours, which is mainly absorbing logs from all over the place and doing the typical dashboard and alerts on them (with Grafana).
This is why you haven't noticed any issues.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25833781
(On this thread, I think the top comment from StavrosK is particularly poignant.) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25834523
If you are Elastic, how could you compete against AWS even if it is your own software ?
Think of it like the Amazon marketplace equivalent: watch for products doing well, then get the cheapest possible clone made and sell it as Amazon Basic, while harassing the original vendors of these products and promoting their own brand in search results.
Amazon, ruining everyone's favorite open source apache projects one at a time.
Bezos is executing better than the original SAAS vendors that FOSS community editions. You want to compete with buff Jeff then make sure you support Azure/GCP too and can price below Bezos' margin above raw EC2 - usually means you have to get creative with spot instances and avoiding cross data center network.