Scylla is licensed under AGPL. Most of the cloud services companies try to stay away from AGPL.

However, I think the real reason is not even that. I suspect underneath it uses modified version of DynamoDB and it's just wire compatible with Cassandra. That's how they are offering pay as you go pricing and auto-scaling.

Considering the kind of resources Apache Cassandra requires to run, I don't think they can offer this kind of pricing. This is the same company that charges $0.2 per hour to run a K8s cluster.

I don't work for AWS, but I do run Cassandra at scale for a living, and this line:

> Considering the kind of resources Apache Cassandra requires to run

Makes no sense. There is plenty of talent at AWS to run Cassandra proper on AWS for less money than they're currently charging for Dynamo. This was true before this announcement - it's how people like Instaclustr stay in business (containerized cassandra as a service on EC2).

Disclosure: I work for AWS

The new Amazon Managed Apache Cassandra Service does use the open source Apache Cassandra code. The team is excited about working with the development community on Cassandra. See more at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/contributing-cassand...

Did you guys swap out the storage guts like Rocksandra did?

Can we access the sstables of our tables?

Can we do triggers and UDF?

Can we access the timestamps at a CELL LEVEL like cassandra proper (VERY important for online/downtimeless data migration)

License, ScyllaDB is AGPL 3.0.

Also maintainability I am assuming. ScyllaDB is written by a team of people experts in writing high performance low level code, and I am not sure it is easy for others to fork it easily. Cassandra being written in java and being a much more normal application (no DPDK), might be easier to fork.

Disclosure: I work for AWS, but this is my personal opinion.

We have lots of developers that write code that's similar to how ScyllaDB is built. Lots of DPDK. There are many other practical reasons why a fork should never be the first choice when building a service that you have to sustain for customers basically forever. Especially if there's active, high velocity development going on.

> what am I missing here?

Mostly that your believing Scylla marketing literature and paid benchmarks over what people actually use and experience. Theres thousands of large Cassandra deployments and a hand full of Scylla ones and it's not because people didn't do their research. If they did to ScyllaDB though it will probably kill the product, with Cassandra this is more of a positive for the community.

That's a strong accusation. Do you have a reference to any 'unpaid benchmarks', so we can judge ourselves?

I would like a scylladb option as well, but it isn't exactly feature parity with cass 3.11.X, to say nothing of 4.X

It started like gangbusters, but I get the feeling the dev money ran out because the feature rollout has completely stalled.

Aside: We have Scylla Cloud. It runs on AWS. Our next major release includes LWT and CDC, so any major gaps will be closed soon. And yes, we're looking at Cassandra 4.0 closely.

In some ways, we will implement features similarly to Cassandra but subtly and importantly different. Example: We do both local and global secondary indexes (Cassandra only has local). Also, our CQL LIKE function is closer in implementation to SQL LIKE than to Cassandra's. And so on.

btw: ScyllaDB just got $25M in new funding in September 2019. We're doing fine financially.

I don't think many enteprises are eager to have AGPL floating around in their repo's or has that changed?

I don't think google allowed checkins of AGPL to their repo but maybe this has all changed.

AGPL and immature.