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OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#21
post #13

It's hard for me to know whether to feel bad for ES in this case. Did they bring it on themselves? Is Amazon too big and a bully? From my perspective, Amazon has made most of its profit price gouging consumers on bandwidth after vendor locking them into their ecosystem, where they bootstrap new services by wrapping open source software with some provisioning scripts, management dashboards and cookie-cutter API / cons…

Is it really price gouging for bandwidth? Or is bandwidth just really expensive in general? I honestly don't know. I would assume if it was actually much cheaper one of the cloud's would undercut the other to get customers.

It's absolutely price gouging. I'm not going to rant about this for the 100th time, but at least I'm in good company [0]. Do the math on the cost you pay if you saturate 1gbps for a month vs. the cost you pay for 1gbps IP transit at basically any colocation provider.

Really this is the secret sauce of the cloud. Create new abstraction layers where you can charge for logical separation on a physical basis. First VMs, then containers, then serverless... Would be cool if somebody did it with bandwidth (looking at you, Cloudflare). Why can't I buy an elastically sized pipe? Why do I need to pay for the stuff I put through it instead of reserving a size for the time I'll need it?

[0] https://twitter.com/eastdakota/status/1371252709836263425

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#22

It's hard for me to know whether to feel bad for ES in this case. Did they bring it on themselves? Is Amazon too big and a bully? From my perspective, Amazon has made most of its profit price gouging consumers on bandwidth after vendor locking them into their ecosystem, where they bootstrap new services by wrapping open source software with some provisioning scripts, management dashboards and cookie-cutter API / cons…

I think the claim that Amazon is winning through "vendor lock-in" is pretty silly. Honestly anyone who can't quickly migrate the stuff they're hosting on AWS onto one of the many other cloud platforms is pretty bad at DevOps. If you're using K8S/Docker/etc it should be trivial . But even if you're not, the vast majority of AWS offerings were either built to be API-compatible with other existing tools (e.g. postgres-c…

If you're not using any of the AWS services, that might be true but then you're also leaving a lot of potential on the table.

If you're "cloud-agnostic" and could migrate away from AWS in the blink of an eye then you're paying for an overpriced VM offering and should probably migrate to a cheaper hosting provider immediately.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#23

It's hard for me to know whether to feel bad for ES in this case. Did they bring it on themselves? Is Amazon too big and a bully? From my perspective, Amazon has made most of its profit price gouging consumers on bandwidth after vendor locking them into their ecosystem, where they bootstrap new services by wrapping open source software with some provisioning scripts, management dashboards and cookie-cutter API / cons…

I think the claim that Amazon is winning through "vendor lock-in" is pretty silly. Honestly anyone who can't quickly migrate the stuff they're hosting on AWS onto one of the many other cloud platforms is pretty bad at DevOps. If you're using K8S/Docker/etc it should be trivial . But even if you're not, the vast majority of AWS offerings were either built to be API-compatible with other existing tools (e.g. postgres-c…

The lock in is real, but they are also the best cloud option and its not even close in my opinion.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#24

It's hard for me to know whether to feel bad for ES in this case. Did they bring it on themselves? Is Amazon too big and a bully? From my perspective, Amazon has made most of its profit price gouging consumers on bandwidth after vendor locking them into their ecosystem, where they bootstrap new services by wrapping open source software with some provisioning scripts, management dashboards and cookie-cutter API / cons…

I think the claim that Amazon is winning through "vendor lock-in" is pretty silly. Honestly anyone who can't quickly migrate the stuff they're hosting on AWS onto one of the many other cloud platforms is pretty bad at DevOps. If you're using K8S/Docker/etc it should be trivial . But even if you're not, the vast majority of AWS offerings were either built to be API-compatible with other existing tools (e.g. postgres-c…

I buy the main reason being the all-in-one solution; the comprehensiveness is attractive. However, I think you're underplaying the lock-in: migrating clouds is non-trivial - mostly due to stuff that's not running in k8s/docker/etc; stateful apps (Postgres, etc), and or just static data like s3. This takes time, and careful planning and sometimes downtime - and is mostly avoided due to it being hard.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a longtime ElasticSearch cluster admin/developer and Elastic Cloud customer, I don't feel bad for Elastic in the slightest and I'm psyched about this fork. The way they operate their cloud service leaves a lot to be desired and encourages maximum spend if you end up wanting to use it for anything demanding in production.

Not to mention the support is pretty slow to respond and rarely respond adequately. At my current client we started with their cloud and in a few months deployed our own in Kubernetes using the official operator. It's a lot cheaper and gives us fewer headaches this way.

My favorite moment as a customer dealing with all of the random times _they_ would take us down (even with triple redundancy) was their suggestion of operating a duplicate 3 datacenter cluster in production as a hot spare.

They must think their customers are cash machines.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#26
post #4

From the announcement: "You should consider the initial code to be at an alpha stage — it is not complete, not thoroughly tested, and not suitable for production use. We are planning to release a beta in the next few weeks, and expect it to stabilize and be ready for production by early summer (mid-2021)." Given that Amazon announced the fork in January and they don't expect it to be production-ready until summer, I'…

6 months from start to prod is... not bad at all? You must be a wizard programmer if that is your typical turnaround time. I don't remember AWS saying something like "it will be ready in weeks" in Jan...

[deleted]

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#27
post #4

From the announcement: "You should consider the initial code to be at an alpha stage — it is not complete, not thoroughly tested, and not suitable for production use. We are planning to release a beta in the next few weeks, and expect it to stabilize and be ready for production by early summer (mid-2021)." Given that Amazon announced the fork in January and they don't expect it to be production-ready until summer, I'…

I would question the assumption that this is “not suitable for production use” means “everything is broken and we're way behind” rather than, say, “we are being extremely conservative because our customers will expect support as soon as we say it's production ready and we need to test every upgrade scenario for our large number of existing customers”. The AWS-managed ElasticSearch seems to be pretty popular and I would expect them to be as conservative about new offerings as they are with, say, RDS.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#29

It's hard for me to know whether to feel bad for ES in this case. Did they bring it on themselves? Is Amazon too big and a bully? From my perspective, Amazon has made most of its profit price gouging consumers on bandwidth after vendor locking them into their ecosystem, where they bootstrap new services by wrapping open source software with some provisioning scripts, management dashboards and cookie-cutter API / cons…

> In fact, Amazon contributes very little to open source in general, considering how much they take from it

I don’t think this is a fact. Amazon seems to contribute pretty significantly according to the pages [0,1] they put out that describes their contributions. Not to mention their membership in OSS foundations like Linux Foundation. [2]

You have the caveat about in relation to benefit they gain, but that’s pretty hard to measure. And I think isn’t really a good measure.

I’d like to learn more about why you make such an absolute claim and maybe you have some better measure.

I remember back in the 90s when big orgs (Microsoft, IBM) didn’t contribute to open source and can’t even think of any big orgs today that don’t contribute to open source. Even Oracle has big open source projects.

[0] https://amzn.github.io/ [1] https://aws.amazon.com/opensource/ [2] https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/join/members/

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