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OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#391
I think even with their "permissive usage guidelines" of the OpenSearch trademark, their own way of how they've been doing Amazon ElasticSearch would not be allowed... For example, you can't do: `Microsoft OpenSearch`, you have to do "for OpenSearch" or "with OpenSearch compatibility".

From their "permissive" trademark policy [1]

> You may also use the “OpenSearch” word mark to make accurate statements about compatibility and interoperability using relational phrases such as “works with,” “runs on,” “compatible with,” and the like (e.g., “Foocorp Software powered by OpenSearch” or “Foocorp Software for OpenSearch” or “Foocorp Software with OpenSearch compatibility”).

1: https://opensearch.org/trademark-usage.html

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#392

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The value in the market is the subject of the parent thread. Anyways, like I said, Elastic could've made money with a proprietary product but they chose OSS instead (and used Apache Lucene to build on). AWS is just offering customers what they want and there are many other companies doing the same thing (IBM's Compose, Aiven, Instaclustr, etc). How is this against OSS? This is the OSS industry operating as intended.

> The value in the market is the subject of the parent thread. As I said, it's a tactic to change the subject. Instead of focusing on actions with bad faith, change the subject by saying they have a lot of money so Amazon is allowed to be competitive and fork the code. > AWS is just offering customers what they want. No. it's not AWS improving some services. It's about a multi-billion dollar company launching a campa…

> "Amazon is allowed to be competitive"

Of course it is. Why wouldn't this be allowed?

> "fork the code"

That's the entire premise of OSS. Would it make a difference if they did it years ago? If not then what's the problem?

Again, the value AWS adds is in operational services because that's what customers want. Are you taking issue with all the other companies offering managed elasticsearch too?

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#393
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Elasticsearch is not a car manufacturer. They are an after market manufacturer for a car which they got without paying themselves. Too many people completely ignore that the heart of Elasticsearch is Lucene. Elasticsearch adds things on top of it, but without Lucene it would be useless. Elasticsearch is the same as Amazon here, but mentioning that doesn't make for such a nice narrative.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was nodding along until this: > and THEN we think about how do we make money from it Do you really need to think? Looking at the on-demand pricing in US East, a m5.4xlarge.elasticsearch instance costs $1.133 an hour, while a m5.4xlarge instance costs $0.768 an hour. That's 47.53% of extra money. And like you said, it only requires a small team to build and maintain the service. It is no coincidence that all cloud p…

Do you really think that all it takes to operate an elasticsearch instance is to white-label an equivalent ec2 instance and execute some shell scripts on it? If that were true, people wouldn't pay for it...

Of course not, don't be ridiculous. My point is that whatever man-power and resources required to run the elasticsearch service can be considered as fixed cost, while the same 47.53% profit margin can continue to "scale" indefinitely, regardless of whether you have 10 customers or 10,000 customers. That's the beauty of it.

As we can see elsewhere in the comments, your biggest competitor appears to be the various kubernetes operators. With kubernetes as the common stack across multiple cloud providers as well as on-prem datacenters, the 10,000 customers can now contribute to the same operator project, to possibly get somewhere close to, or even exceed, what AWS can do with a small team of engineers.

Perhaps anticipating this trend, GKE now has an "autopilot" mode, such that a 30% profit margin is already included in the node pricing. That's one hell of a moneymaker.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#396
post #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…

I have no idea if Amazon does this or not, but maintaining forks of projects is no fun, so it's in a company's best interest to contribute bug fixes and improvements that aren't part of their secret sauce.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#397

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't this an example of an open source business model. Amazon is supporting development of this Apache 2.0 licensed OSS, which they plan to make money off of...

Indeed. But they are not the company supposed to make money of that project. They start to dominate several markets by cross financing and therefore need to be broken up.

Why not? Elastic built their product off of Lucene, why are they the only people that get to make money of this particular piece of OSS?

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#398

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…

Coincidentally, AWS hasn't open-sourced anything that they use internally. Zilch. Nada. And yet they are using 'open source' developed by another firm (smaller is inconsequential here) to market themselves. IMO, FOSS licensing is completely broken. Its definitions (of what is free/open) are from a boomer's era that is no longer sustainable. At least I wouldn’t want any of my FOSS projects become “corporate strategy”…

> Coincidentally, AWS hasn't open-sourced anything that they use internally. Zilch. Nada.

Firecracker. s2n.

Not much, I agree

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#399
post #99

I have mixed feelings about this server side license stuff that mongo db started. Imagine where the internet would be today if the creators of apache and mysql had tried to prevent shared hosting providers in the early days of the web from using their software

The server side license stuff doesn't prevent shared hosting providers from using software. It just requires hosting providers to open source their infrastructure. I think the internet would be even better today, if shared hosting providers had been sharing infrastructure technology since 25 years ago.

I don't think sspl is realistic to be able to comply with. This clause is ridiculously wide:

> Corresponding Source for all programs that you use to make the Program or modified version available as a service

All programs you use

Every single one of them.

There is literally no limit on what sources you would need to publish. You don't need to think very long to realize how impossible that is.

Re: OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#400

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 am with you. The release could read:

"having subsumed the opensource version of ES, we are now relicensing, calling it our own, and would be really happy if the opensource community would lie to contribute, because actually we don't totally understand how this product works. Many thanks to all who help us"

The issue with AWS version are many fold, but the main one is that it forces extra usage of expensive EC2 units, for the following reasons:

1. Blue/Green updates -> Start a new cluster with new version, lock current cluster, copy over all the data (can take over a day), at the same time write to both clusters, when finished, lock both clusters while endpoints are swapped over, unlock new cluster, trash old cluster. During this process Customer pays for both. - Solution, done properly, fire up new node with new version, swap it in, wait for 'green', take out old... wait for 'green'.. rinse and repeat. Result.. system never goes down, endpoints remain the same, less cost to customer.

2.There are a minimum of the folloowing node types: - Master (small) x3 - Data (heavy on storage, medium on memory) - Hot Data (very heavy on memory as shards have to be held in memory) - Coordinating (query) nodes, heavy on memory, light on storage (cos there is no real storage) - Ingest (same as Query). - voting only.. tiny - AI/ML heavy on memory and storage.. cos they do real work In the AS world they have: - Masters - Data - Hot Data (cos they are really pricey) The Data nodes do all teh functionality of the data, ingest and query nodes. Th emain query always gores to a data node, while it passes to other data nodes to get the data out, then aggregates locally to it... so its incorrect usage of the system. A data node should only ever deal with its own data, and pass the results it finds back to a node away from the data.

As your system is squeezed.. you add data nodes... not coordinating/Query or Ingest nodes, which you probably need. But thats more money into the coffers.

3. Their userhasging function is also old (2011 vesrion of bcrypt) , and fails. Any static password produces different results everytime you use it.. at least on the current opendistro. So you are forced into either not using security, or using proper security, which can be cumbersome across the cluster (if rolling your own). however.. on the cloud version they have base level security working, so thats Ok.. they arent using their own 'open' software.

I could go on.. but its all flaky, and misunderstood at the core developer level. Toput on record, I have spoken twice to teh core development team to describe how updates should happen.. the last time 18 months ago (by 'spoken' I mean a face to face video call) .. so they know hoe it should be done.. but dont do it.

4. I have noticed that there are some functions/methods available on the setup in Amazon Linux, that dont exist on other Linux versions (centOs/Debian) that are security related. AWS Linux is 'lifted' from Redhat.. so another piece of software that they didnt write.. but obviously Redhat are happy with this. Maybe they got the licensing deal sorted .. who knows.

basically gores like this:

"Who would actually install, in production, what essentially is very close to pirated software?"

Roll your own.. its a bit of grunt work up front, then 50% the cost of the cloud version.

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