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Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

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Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#81

Post by dahcryn »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #52

Are there any cheaper alternatives to Databricks, EC2, DynamoDB, S3 solution? Where cost is more predictable and controlled? What's a good roll your own solution? DB storage doesn't need to be dynamic like with DynamoDB. At max 1TB - maybe double in the future. Could this be done on a mid size VPS (32GB RAM) hosting Apache Spark etc - or better to have a couple? P.S. total beginner in this space, hence the (naive) qu…

I don't think there is anything out there that really bundles everything exactly like databricks does.

There are better storage solutions, better compute and better AI/ML platforms, but once you start with databricks, you dig yourself a hole because the replacing it is hard because it has such a specific subset of features across multiple domains.

In our multinational environment, we have a few companies that are on different tech stacks (result of M&A). I can say Snowflake can do a lot of the things Databricks does, but not everything. Teradata is also great and somehow not gaining a lot of traction. But they are near impossible to get into as a startup, which does not attract new talent to give it a go.

On the ML side, Dataiku and Datarobot are great.

Tools like Talend, snaplogic, fivetran are also really good at replacing parts of databricks.

So you see, there are better alternatives for sure, cheaper at the same time too, but there is no drop-in replacement I can think of

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#83

Post by dahcryn »

hobs wrote: post #70
AJRF wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on how you define cheaper - you could set up Apache Iceberg, Spark, MLFlow, AirFlow, JupyterLab, etc and create an abomination that sort of looks like Databricks if you squint, but then you have to deal with set up, maintenance, support, etc. Computationally speaking - again depends on what your company does - Collect a lot of data? You need a lot of storage. Train ML Models, you will need GPUs - and you need…

Don't worry, most places go straight with databricks and get a flaky as hell system that falls apart anyway, but then they can blame databricks instead of their own incompetence.

yeah where IT blocks half of the config, and you disable half of the features that could make it great, just to make sure they definitely don't give control to..GASP... A DATA ENGINEER

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#84

Post by dahcryn »

thrown-0825 wrote: post #58
ed_elliott_asc wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’d imagine pretty much all of the s and p 500 companies rely on databricks, a large percentage of them at least

for what? managed postgres and some ml training tools?

because it's recommended by nearly all consultants and Microsoft.

Simple as that, it's consulting Heaven. Much like SAS and SAP. Everybody happy. Now to be far to databricks, if used properly and ignore the cost, it does actually function pretty well. Compared to Synapse, PowerBI Tabular, Fabric, Azure ML, ... that's already a big big big step forward.

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#85

Post by throwawaydbb »

TuringNYC wrote: post #65
throwawaydbb wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Since this year the employees are vesting RSUs (not options, and also no expiry date) quorterly now, they sell a portion of them (automatically) and pay taxes to the government at each vesting event, as the expiry date no longer exists. For liquidity there are tenders where employees sell their stock privately, so the employees no longer need IPO to cash out. Just to clarify - for many years employees were getting th…

So what happened to employees who had RSUs with expirations that have passed? Do they lose the value? I know my startup stock had 10yr expirations.

It didn’t happen as they were careful to make a tender before expiration hit anyone.

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#86

Post by rescripting »

e40 wrote: post #51
federiconafria wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even more if you are familiar with their pricing.

This! We did some simple testing on their platform to integrate it into our product for a customer. In a few days of light work rang up a huge bill. Many multiples of what we spend on OpenAI, which gets heavy use.

Its unfair to compare Databricks to OpenAI because they're at very different points in the enshittification[1] process.

OpenAI is still early, burning VC money to acquire customers by operating at a loss. This makes it appear cheap.

DataBricks is further along, attempting to claw back the value they provided to customers by raising prices.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enshittification

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#87

Post by dahcryn »

retinaros wrote: post #19

I always struggled to understand how do you make a company adopt a platform like databricks to « manage data » isnt managing data a minefield with plenty of open source pieces of software that serve different purposes ? who is the typical databricks customer?

you kill off all open source pieces, in turn compliance is happy, and a CTO is happy because he has a maintenance contract and can blame other people if stuff goes wrong.

It's a way to get those pesky Python people to shut up

Oh, and a CTO is always valued more if he manages a 5 million Databricks budget, where he can prove his worth by showing a 5% discount het negotiated very well, than a 1 million whatever-else budget that would be best in class. Everybody wins.

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#88

Post by hiyer »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #52

Are there any cheaper alternatives to Databricks, EC2, DynamoDB, S3 solution? Where cost is more predictable and controlled? What's a good roll your own solution? DB storage doesn't need to be dynamic like with DynamoDB. At max 1TB - maybe double in the future. Could this be done on a mid size VPS (32GB RAM) hosting Apache Spark etc - or better to have a couple? P.S. total beginner in this space, hence the (naive) qu…

For a few TBs of data, well partitioned and stored in parquet or some such format, you could just use duckdb on a single node.

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#89

Post by [deleted] »

uxcolumbo wrote: post #52

Are there any cheaper alternatives to Databricks, EC2, DynamoDB, S3 solution? Where cost is more predictable and controlled? What's a good roll your own solution? DB storage doesn't need to be dynamic like with DynamoDB. At max 1TB - maybe double in the future. Could this be done on a mid size VPS (32GB RAM) hosting Apache Spark etc - or better to have a couple? P.S. total beginner in this space, hence the (naive) qu…

[deleted]

Re: Databricks is raising a Series K Investment at >$100B valuation

#90

Post by hiyer »

dude250711 wrote: post #48

It will be a nice discount acquihire for Microsoft in a few years.

Databricks on azure is huge. I've heard that in some Azure regions, over 70% of the compute usage is just Databricks. So there is definitely an incentive for MS to acquire them.
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