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OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#41

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…

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.

> The way they operate their cloud service leaves a lot to be desired and encourages maximum spend

Pretty sure this is the definition of SAAS and IAAS

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#42
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'…

The fork announcement was announced as a response to the Elastic stuff. I don't think they made any predictions about when it'd be ready in that blog post, so I'm not sure why they would've underestimated anything?

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#43

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…

One thing which surprised me: Elastic has a market capitalization of ~$11B.

I think that changes some of the more floaty ethical concerns. This is not a David vs Goliath situation. This is Goliath vs Super-Goliath.

At this point, I'm much less interested in the drama of which mega-corp is screwing over the other. I'm more interested in: how does it affect me? When the titans are done trampling over the rest of us, which side benefits me the most?

Its too early to tell, but it seems like it'll be Amazon. The product is more open. They have a demonstrated history of great support. Yeah, they gouge us on networking and everything else, but at least they're the devil we know, and buying into the OpenSearch ecosystem has a greater probability of being the more open solution into the next decade.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#44
post #41

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.

> The way they operate their cloud service leaves a lot to be desired and encourages maximum spend Pretty sure this is the definition of SAAS and IAAS

They all give you levers. I'm more referring to being required to overspend to overcome Elastic's incompetence (i.e., you're already aware of the levers, they're maxed out and the provider doesn't have a way forward).

Referring to my other example, in more detail: Elastic Cloud suggests operating your cluster across 3 datacenters for redundancy. This is a good idea. Then Elastic does maintenance in all three datacenters that your infrastructure is in at once and takes your clusters hard down. This is fucking stupid. Elastic's suggested solution to the problem: Operate a _duplicate_ cluster in 3 datacenters in a different region/provider. No guarantees that they won't do the same there either so it's not actually a solution.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#45

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…

No need to feel bad. The CEO sold a lot of his shares prior to the license change.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#46
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

boy howdy, with all the flak i hear about this and the awesome talent in tech, you'd figure an entrepreneur or 1000 would take a stab at this, make it better, charge less. apparently there's gazillions to be made by even charging 50 percent of what AWS does.

so, when should we expect this gloriously efficient competitive market to kick in to action?

my guess is that the AWS ecosystem, despite "price gouging", is simply the best and will be because this is really hard, non-glorious engineering, where solid reliability actually matters. anyone who wants to can go ahead and co-lo, so, whatever. people who want cloud will pay, and those who can't or won't, will not.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#47
I'm happy to see a couple of good choices made here:

- Sticking with Apache 2.0

- Asking for a Developer Certificate-of-Origin rather than a copyright assignment

This bodes well for the future of this fork. Amazon also has the resources necessary to keep up consistent and quality maintenance of a project on this scale.

Elastic would definitely like you to view AWS as the Big Bad here, but their response to the Elastic betrayal is very good, and I would like to see more like this in the future.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#48

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…

How is it price gouging if the price is on the tin? It isn't like there's a "surprise" as to how much they charge, and it isn't like there aren't a dozen alternatives including DIY.

I'm the first to say that AWS is too expensive, and I vote with my wallet (and the company I work for by proxy). But I'll never claim that there's any gouging involved.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#49
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 really is price gouging - bandwidth is actually cheap.

A couple of comparisons:

Oracle Cloud give you 10TB of bandwidth for free, with overage charged at around €7.5/TB.

You can rent a VPS from the likes of Hetzner, and they will throw in 2-20TB of bandwidth for free, with overage charged at something like €1/TB - AWS charge an eye-watering €125 for each TB!

I think the reason the big 3 (AWS, Azure, GCP) still charge such huge amounts is that they profit so greatly from it, and there is more than enough business to go round.

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