It's nice to see that AWS partnered with Grafana Labs on this. Both companies stand to benefit, and the success of Grafana Labs helps ensure the long-term success of Grafana.

Here's the Grafana Labs press release: https://grafana.com/blog/2020/12/15/announcing-amazon-manage...

You know, work with us or we'll OpenDistro you.

This is always easier if the starting point of that two-pizza team is fairly close to "clone the version that already works, change the name, and run the deploy script".

> We do this all the time on a smaller scale at our company to avoid license fees

There is a huge difference between you doing something for your in-house use, and Amazon doing something in order to turn around and re-sell it.

Is there? Or is it your bias against commercialization or profit motive of modifications to free software? It seems to me that it's the same changes to the code.

This model only works with the OSS/community versions of software. If the the only value of your hosted offering is the hosting I would expect you to get eaten by a company with cheaper hosting costs than you. I'm talking specifically about a clean-room reimplementation of proprietary add-ons that typically make up the "enterprise" version of lots of software.

By this logic Google and Amazon should just own-all-the-things because they have the cheapest hosting costs?

> I'm talking specifically about a clean-room reimplementation of proprietary add-ons that typically make up the "enterprise" version of lots of software.

I don't know what you mean here. As far as I know this is not what is being discussed. Amazon has done no "clean-room reimplementation" here.

Next, if the way you plan to monetize your OSS software is by selling a proprietary "enterprise" version but the features that version includes are easy to clone and your licensing costs are high then large companies will just hire people to develop their own in-house version and they might kill your business by open sourcing their version because they don't need to sell their in-house version to make it worth the cost.

tldr: corporate engineers have to be trained to respect and understand open source and it's just weird.

There really isn't. If you make your work available to the world so that everyone has the right to not only use it as they see fit but also extend it to fit their needs then you cannot complain that someone is using said work as they see fit and extending it to fit their needs.

There is a considerable problem in enterprise software where trivial features are enormously expensive. If you hide all of the useful authentication features behind thousands (or tens, or hundreds of thousands) them don’t be surprised when somebody scoops you.

Value add needs to be more like added value than ransom.

If you have any emotional response like that it's 'ransom', then you're probably not the target audience for the enterprise tier.

(And I don't mean that you don't need/can't make use of features hidden in that tier, just that if there are many in the same boat, then the provider misjudged the contents of that tier.)

Free for some to use under certain restrictions. Therefore not Open Source (which is totally OK, I just want to make sure there's no confusion).

It is so horrible compared to GitHub.

EBS was never it, and Lambda is a different type of product (and also won't autodeploy from your GitHub master without custom CI/actions/whatever).

Then there's Lightsail, which is perhaps the lamest DO ripoff that could possibly be engineered. I'm sure there are other examples, too, but those are the ones with which I'm familiar.

Support open source.

If you can't do that, it's not free software, despite what the AGPL torch-carriers think. Freedom means free to do things that may be contrary to the desires and interests of the original authors: this is why software with "no military/no missiles/no bombs/etc" clauses in their licenses are not free software.

That's even more exciting news.

But this also must have major implications for Grafana Labs, since selling hosted prometheus is also a part of their business.

Edit: Found the announcement at https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/join-the-preview-amazon-man...

I wouldn't be so sure.

Not only is this taking-and-running an open source project, but on top of that, the pricing is per user? This feels like a step beyond "hosting software for you", and towards "building a business with someone else's product"

I see that this is in partnership with Grafana Labs, which I guess is a good thing, but I can't comprehend why Grafana would have gone along with this (short of some sort of "well we're doing it either way" threat from Amazon).

I don't see anything new here that Amazon is providing on top of what Grafana Labs already did. What am I missing?

Plenty of companies incorporate a hosted Grafana in their product.

A few monitoring platforms too: https://HostedGraphite.com for many years now, and my own https://HostedMetrics.com in the last few years.

1. Your product is integrating multiple tools and data sources to provide value beyond "just grafana".

2. You're are not Amazon, and I think that is actually a big point here. It's unlikely that someone will choose your product over Grafana if they are just looking for a hosted Grafana. I don't think that's really the case with an AWS alternative.

If not you're just speculating that Amazon is acting in an very un-historical-Amazon way.

Down in the Conclusion section at the bottom:

"AWS, working with Grafana Labs, will be contributing licensing revenue and code to help make Grafana even better, not just for the AWS service, but also for open source users and Grafana Cloud customers."

The initial content that I had read indicated that it was Grafana Enterprise licences that would be contributed back.

This is a new step for Amazon, which is good. In this case this feels closer to a first-party AWS Marketplace app for Grafana.

What's the survival rate of Amazon partners?

Same with book prices. Lots of cheap e-books, and then I see "price set by publisher" and its $29.99.

Yikes. Per-user pricing is tough for data visualization tools, since the audience for a dashboard could be really broad.

Security wise, as far as I know AWS isn't offering anything additional here.

The argument of "but you're paying to not have to worry about it!" that is a fair argument. But comments like this seem to purposely over-state the difficulty of running a not-super-complicated tool like Grafana in order to make "only $600/month, or $7.2k/year", sound more appealing.

Moving to a different server (or cloning for HA redundancy) takes maybe 5 minutes to copy the JSON and make a crontab entry. It's pretty much the lowest headache software imaginable.

They follow the 12-factor app principles, provide a ready-to-use docker image, support various auth providers ( my company uses GitHub), integrates well with AWS IAM, etc.

As someone else said here, you just have to use RDS to store the state.

IF this is the case, this is a HUGE step forward for OSS.

It is a clear and simple way for OS to monetize software, while AWS keep focusing on what it does best, operations.

This ensure long term sustainability of software and hefty profit margin for the operators.

Win-Win!

Realistically though, with 3 major cloud vendors to choose from, I don't think the danger of app-store style control holds in the same way.

Although, I suppose steam is an argument to the alternative, though they haven’t successfully abused their position afaik (like their attempt to monetize general modding communities across non-valve games)

I know one relates to API compatibility, but those companies never end to surprise me.

[1] https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/aws-gives-open-source-the-...

I don't think this announcement is as juicy or controversial as you were hoping. It appears this was developed jointly with Grafana Labs as a part of a longer term partnership: https://grafana.com/blog/2020/12/15/announcing-amazon-manage...

This is a thumb up for open source the development model.

IMHO I will be more worried that a good piece of open source software is only commercialized by one company, by all accounts, that leaves a lot of risks unaddressed.

Lastly, to anyone claim that this hurts their feeling, I cannot help feel very surprised that one with some ideas of the business cycle and Amazon's (or any big corporations) track record, would not anticipate this. Personally, I am surprised that AWS have not started this in 2014, I guess they have been so successful that they probably cannot hire fast enough to get started.

Something like this: https://grafana.wikimedia.org/

Edit: ha, nevermind I see they just released AWS Prometheus today as well.