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AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

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Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#891

Post by dumpsterdiver »

jasontedor wrote: post #592
bawolff wrote: post #551

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not if I am a cloud provider.

Jason from Elastic here. I want to clarify this. Building a SaaS product with Elasticsearch or Kibana on the backend is okay and not prohibited, as long the service is not “managed” Elasticsearch nor Kibana. For example, a music service that uses Elasticsearch on the backend to provide music catalog search is okay. A service that offers site search powered by Elasticsearch is okay. A log search service powered by Ela…

> A log search service powered by Elasticsearch is okay (again, provided it doesn’t expose Elasticsearch functionality).

You speak as if Elastic has any say in how people use OSS. Why would anyone use the newly hampered version of ES when they can use and contribute to Amazon's truly open fork? Aside from the bad taste left in everyone's mouth from the whole "Doubling down on open" nonsense, all that reasonable people are going to see now when looking at Elastic's software (ES 7.11+) is unnecessary risk and legal ambiguity.

The disingenous market speak on Elastic's blog post was so thinly veiled that it quickly became insulting. It was gross to watch such a shameful justification form on why everyone should be okay that Elastic will continue using the marketing terms "free" and "open". By forcing a well funded fork by Amazon, Elastic may have just relegated themselves into obsolescence.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#892

Post by freeqaz »

growse wrote: post #788
pydry wrote: post #756

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES AWS is too big to really be competing fairly. They have vendor lockin on customers, an enormous war chest they can (and have) used for predatory pricing and they control, like, 1/2 the hosting market. With all that they can almost murder elastic search in their sleep without providing a better service. That will not just be bad for ES it will be bad for everyone who…

> >AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES > AWS is too big to really be competing fairly. They have vendor lockin on customers, an enormous war chest they can (and have) used for predatory pricing and they control, like, 1/2 the hosting market. > With all that they can almost murder elastic search in their sleep without providing a better service. > That will not just be bad for ES it will be bad for ever…

I think the "war chest" argument here is that AWS can out compete any other hosting solution by "slowly burning" their way to the top. AWS is a conglomerate and can afford to lose money on a single service. Companies like ES cannot without going under. It is monopolistic behavior and that is harmful.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#893

Post by runamok »

kodah wrote: post #384
markphip wrote: post #27

I do not get why people are coming down on AWS here. Elastic made the software available under the Apache License. That gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that. AWS contributes improvements to the project. This is just about Elastic and their business model. They could have not made it open source and it probably just would not have been…

I don't really get how people get this twisted. ES and other companies have a business that sells a managed version of their product. This is how they sustain developers to continue working on Elastic Search. This model has worked for companies long before cloud providers were a thing. What AWS and others basically did is create identical services, keep all the profits, and exploit gaps in Open Source licensing to th…

I dont't agree with "If they don't survive it will just be a matter of time before ES is dropped by Amazon and totally unsupported."

Unlike Google, Amazon is fantastic about supporting older AWS products. I can't think of any off hand that are completely gone. There are some that might be deprecated that you can no longer create new ones of though. An ancient database service comes to mind but I can't recall it's name.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#894

Post by dzader »

ujwaltrivedi wrote: post #841
markphip wrote: post #27

I do not get why people are coming down on AWS here. Elastic made the software available under the Apache License. That gives AWS the right to offer this service. Maybe they did not have right to trademarks, there are courts to settle that. AWS contributes improvements to the project. This is just about Elastic and their business model. They could have not made it open source and it probably just would not have been…

We use ES and Kibana open source. Our entire infrastructure is on AWS and if AWS is managing the installation and maintenance efforts thats a great help. ES was never going to make a penny from us anyways and AWS is not making any money from the ES software itself. What they are making money is from our usage of their core services. Same goes for all the other open softwares, Kafka, Airflow, EMR to name some. Plus it…

https://www.elastic.co/enterprise-search#deploy-your-way:~:t....

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#895

Post by [deleted] »

_msw_ wrote: post #377
brasetvik wrote: post #117

While it's great that AWS has indeed contributed fixes to upstream Elasticsearch, they link to 9 PRs that are generally on the trivial end of the scale. (Though I don't doubt the PR that adds a missing synchronized keyword might have been gnarly and time consuming to debug, and that diff size does not necessarily correlate to importance) For a project AWS was making hundreds of millions in revenue on four years ago (…

Disclosure: I work at Amazon on cloud infrastructure, but not on the codebase in question. I helped with parts of the blog post to try to explain some of the nuance about how things are set up with Elasticsearch as an "upstream". The 9 PRs were only to demonstrate working in the "upstream first" practice, and aren't exhaustive. It also doesn't cover the additional work in the Apache Lucene project that benefits Elast…

[deleted]

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#896

Post by CRConrad »

ABeeSea wrote: post #260
jeswin wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Elastic Search launched more than a decade back, when the cloud was used in an entirely different manner. The team had no way to foresee the shift to the managed services model; of AWS taking popular Open Source products, repackaging it and undercutting the original authors. The decent thing to do (for all managed Open Source products that you didn't create yourself), would have been to offer a cut to the original te…

AWS launched RDS with MySQL 4 months before the first version of ElasticSearch. Yea in that case it was Oracle, but I think it was clear what the direction was. And it was definitely clear in 2014 with Aurora and Redshift. They could have changed their license in 2015, but they didn’t. Why?

If it was around 2010 MySQL was not yet Oracle. (Maybe not even yet Sun?)

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#897

Post by greatpatton »

dodobirdlord wrote: post #403
sjwright wrote: post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is the "fair share" payment for ElasticSearch under its Apache license? I'm not a lawyer but it appears to be $0. Meanwhile, how come everyone showing sympathy for Elastic's position doesn't seem to be showing equal sympathy for Apache Lucene? Surely Lucene is deserving of at least as much credit as Elastic.

If I recall correctly, the creator, chief maintainers, and primary contributors to Lucene are also at Elastic. The ElasticSearch/Lucene distinction is one primarily brought up by AWS advocates to muddy the waters.

Doug Cutting is at Cloudera.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#898

Post by fastball »

freeqaz wrote: post #892
growse wrote: post #788

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> >AWS is competing too well with Elastic's hosted ES > AWS is too big to really be competing fairly. They have vendor lockin on customers, an enormous war chest they can (and have) used for predatory pricing and they control, like, 1/2 the hosting market. > With all that they can almost murder elastic search in their sleep without providing a better service. > That will not just be bad for ES it will be bad for ever…

I think the "war chest" argument here is that AWS can out compete any other hosting solution by "slowly burning" their way to the top. AWS is a conglomerate and can afford to lose money on a single service. Companies like ES cannot without going under. It is monopolistic behavior and that is harmful.

It's really not a monopoly though? There are quite a few cloud providers.

AWS has lots of services. Customers like it when all of their cloud is managed under one roof (apparently).

AWS is definitely competing fairly, it's just... people like their offering better.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#899

Post by fastball »

smokey_circles wrote: post #675
fastball wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do people really believe Amazon is as predatory as this comment makes out? Amazon is winning because they've been delivering a better product in general . AWS was a game-changer when it came on the scene. They continue to add new services all the time. AMZN is not MSFT. Why would Amazon need to nerf the other guys when people like them better in the first place?

I don't think their intention is to Embrace, Extend, Extinguish, but I also think it's a side affect of being such a behemoth with a much better offering. I can't think of a way to offer an OSS product and make money in the "traditional" means of support when Amazon is around. You just can't compete with them because you're right: They are a MUCH better product. Not because they understand the software better than yo…

Well that is what the other major cloud providers arranged with Elastic (licensing deals).

AWS chose not to, and that's OK too. Elastic still pulled in $500M in revenue last year, so clearly you can compete with AWS in the market.

Re: AWS announces forks of Elasticsearch and Kibana

#900

Post by fastball »

floatingatoll wrote: post #654
fastball wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think "it's legal but not necessarily moral" is a bit of a dodge. It's not just legal. It's explicitly allowed behavior according to the license that Elastic chose . This isn't like "yes it's the law but some laws aren't fair!". The only laws that are coming into play here are basically ones which say "you made your bed now lie in it". Elastic explicitly said (by choosing a license) "you can do X with our software!…

Morality is not enforceable through software licensing, nor necessarily enforceable at all.

If the moral behavior can be agreed on, surely it can be stipulated?
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