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OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#181

Post by fallat »

manigandham wrote: post #131
fallat wrote: post #84

So as someone who has heard about Elasticsearch for years and years, and seen all this, right this moment I've decided to see what it really is. On their home page, "Why use Elastic search?", the reasons are basically: * It's fast! * It does a lot of stuff! * It has some tools to visualize data! * It's distributed!! I have to say this is not very appealing to me since it sounds like something any database could do.

The Elastic website has a dedicated page to explain: https://www.elastic.co/what-is/elasticsearch "Elasticsearch is a distributed, free and open search and analytics engine for all types of data, including textual, numerical, geospatial, structured, and unstructured. Elasticsearch is built on Apache Lucene and was first released in 2010..." I suggest understanding what it is first before comparing it to other databas…

A lot of databases handle many types of data.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#182

Post by sofixa »

ballenf wrote: post #73
jnwatson wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Price gouging is the practice of using outsized leverage in a particular market to charge excessive prices. Like snow shovels doubling in price after a snow storm. Or $10 water bottles after a hurricane. So for AWS the term is arguably correctly applied. But I'd be more worried about the market if AWS was artificially undercutting pricing because it would kill the incentive to create competitors or innovation in the…

> Price gouging is the practice of using outsized leverage in a particular market to charge excessive prices. Like snow shovels doubling in price after a snow storm. Or $10 water bottles after a hurricane. > So for AWS the term is arguably correctly applied

What outsized leverage have AWS had for a decade? There are multiple competitors at different levels, AWS are just better in terms of coverage/redundancy and amount of services.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#183

Post by jimmy2020 »

benmller313 wrote: post #171
jimmy2020 wrote: post #151

Is there any good that done by Amazon to support OSS? Like ever. They started with cloning MongoDB and now Elastic with actually zero contribution to the community regardless of their insane profits. This is a clear single. Amazon can always clone and redistribute any open source software then lock it in for AWS. If we've started to witness declining in OSS, well at least we know now who started the wave.

This seems like a much more positive response than the one they took with MongoDB. I agree, Amazon hasn't done much, but maybe this could be a start?

The start maybe done by open source some technology they use that can profit and help other startups. Maybe open source their own version of "React". That will be a good start.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#184

Post by Twirrim »

jimmy2020 wrote: post #159
unethical_ban wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're asserting that they have forked OSS and then not provided back the source code for their own improvements. I guess we can check their github repos to see if that's the case.

As far as I know DocumentDB is closed source. Btw: I can name zero OSS projects from Amazon and this is not the same for Microsoft (VScode, TS) and FB (React, Jest).

Firecracker, s2n, chalice, jsii.

On top of that AWS has done a lot of contributions upstream, particularly around the linux kernel, https://git.kernel.org/pub/scm/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/lin..., (particularly the virtualisation stacks involved), some around OpenJDK at what looks like an increasing pace, and the like.

To be clear: not an AWS employee.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#185

Post by stefan_ »

cle wrote: post #115
hintymad wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds trivial to "wrap open source software", but surprisingly it is big value-add to thousands of companies. We can't just look at successful companies like Netflix to downplay the challenges of operating a service. Not every company knows how to operate complex systems under manageable cost. How many companies can really manage a Kafka cluster, let alone scaling it, for instance? Indeed, even companies that peo…

This is the most important point, IMO. Amazon's value add is not the software itself, it's the operation of the software. That includes a LOT of stuff, not just making sure it's running. It's security modeling and patching, compliance, DDOS protection, etc. Amazon's product is an army of ops engineers working 24/7 to keep your stuff secure and online. With that in mind, their behavior here makes a lot more sense, and…

You can rent a car but nobody would suggest the car manufacturer be paid nothing for the privilege just cause the rental company cracked car maintenance and how to fill the tank.

The AWS "value add" is only value add in the context of being locked into AWS in the first place.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#186

Post by sofixa »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #21
minhazm wrote: 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,…

That Twitter thread is only including pure bandwidth. What about all the highly redundant networking equipment ( firewalls, routers, switches, Nitro offloading, DDoS protection, attack detection), software for all those abstractions you get ( VPCs, subnets, security groups, vpc peerings, Elastic IPs etc. ) and engineers? None of what i listed you pay for directly, and bandwidth seems to be the most reasonable product to lump it all in.

It's like going to a restaurant and complaining about the price of steaks because beef should cost a lot less. There's a ton of other things involved, and yes, they probably have a decent margin, but not as much as you initially imply.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#187

Post by bigtones »

dijit wrote: post #88
bogomipz wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is really a shame to hear. There was once a an Elastic SaaS company from Norway called found.io that were pretty sharp and customer-centric. They were acquired be Elastic pretty early on[1]. I believe Elastic Cloud was built from this. I guess found.io's culture of delivering a good product didn't survive? https://www.elastic.co/about/press/elastic-acquires-elastics...

Honestly the amount of negativity towards Elastic in this thread is jarring. I’ve been an ES customer (self hosted, some cloud) for years and have only good things to say about them. Maybe I’m less a fan of the number of features they try to bake in and the direction of the company towards using logs for metrics (which causes heavy disk load instead of just storing metrics in time series) but. Yeah. I truly believe t…

Are you even a customer if you don't pay Elastic any money ? Your a user, sure, but not a customer.

These other opinions and negative voices you reference come from actual customers who pay Elastic large sums of money, and they feel they don't get good value and service for that money they're forking over.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#188

Post by waynesonfire »

amzn-throw wrote: post #179
TechBro8615 wrote: post #9

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…

> they can invest more resources into developing it than the original team ever could. I know this is a popular narrative, but as someone who works on AWS, I think you would be shocked by how small the individual dev teams are that build and maintain the services that everyone uses. I'm not going to downplay the network effects involved. Of course AWS has a tremendous advantage in being able to standardize the custom…

they have as many people dedicated to the capability as needed. at least the capabilities have owners, which from my experience is not trivial for an organization to achieve.

curious if others have noticed this as well (capabilities without clear owners)? what does this depend on? time? company size? both?

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#189

Post by invertedreversi »

yandie wrote: post #169
jimmy2020 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As far as I know DocumentDB is closed source. Btw: I can name zero OSS projects from Amazon and this is not the same for Microsoft (VScode, TS) and FB (React, Jest).

Firecracker is a famous one that I can think of.

Fork of Google crosvm

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#190

Post by grumple »

TechBro8615 wrote: post #9

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…

Here are the main reasons to make open source software:

To provide something for free, public use

To get the world to help you maintain your software

A reason to not make open source software:

You want the exclusive right to offer that software as part of a paid service

This is not the first instance of a company not understanding the last point there, and it won't be the last.

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