Some observations:

(1) It's interesting how much of the reasoning/argumentation for these restrictive licenses ultimately comes down to a more articulate form of "but that's not fair!". I also wonder how much the implicit beliefs that "unrestrained capitalism is a bad thing", "markets naturally lead towards monopolies", "antitrust law is legitimately necessary", etc are impacting peoples' reasoning here.

(2) If they can't actually compete and provide superior value to whatever managed offering Amazon can scrounge together, that's actually their fault. AWS' managed elasticsearch offering is absolutely terrible, speaking from experience. They block access to important APIs like `reroute`, any minor cluster change results in a whole blue-green deployment which very frequently hits a race condition that prevents the newer cluster from ever coming up healthy, requiring a ticket to be filed that takes multiple days to respond to if you don't have premium support, etc.

So functionally the idea that AWS is going to fleece them because they'll offer a just-as-good service for cheaper has not been the case. Elastic co's managed offering is simply far superior.

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Ultimately, Elastic has shown that they don't actually want to release FOSS. They want to release proprietary software, and that's why the (in hindsight very easy to foresee) usecase of a cloud provider offering a managed service angers them so much. They don't really breathe the FOSS mindset, because a true non-restrictive license (BSD, Apache 2.0 etc) means that a company can absolutely use your software to make money and that's okay.

Anyway, Elasticsearch is incredible software and the Elastic team has made something truly incredible. I just wish they had a vision for monetization that aligned with their open-source beginnings. It's clear that they don't, and the sooner they stop pretending they're offering a free or open-source solution here, the better.

The problem is that nobody buys AWS ElasticSearch because of quality. They buy it because they already have AWS approved as a vendor and a blank check to spend on it.

Yeah, so they’re not really competing with Elastic right? If I already have an AWS environment I’m never going to use an Elastic hosted service, since it’d be outside my VPC.

I really don’t understand how that business model works.

If you have an AWS env, and they have no comparable alternative, you may be forced to look outside AWS, eg: to Elatic's SaaS offering. But in many cases, if AWS has a comparable offering, you simply don't bother looking outside.

It's similar to bundling tactic of Microsoft, and other big vendors. By bundling MS Teams with other things, no one has to "buy" Teams, they already get it for "free" (well, it's no extra cost beyond what they would be paying for Office or whatever already), so why "buy" Slack when you have a similar chat tool for "free".

But what if the customer needs ElasticSearch, see that AWS provides it and don't look further?

If AWS didn't take the work of Elastic those customers might have used Elastic's services instead.

How can AWS offering the same thing not be competing against Elastic's offering?

> 2) If they can't actually compete and provide superior value to whatever managed offering Amazon can scrounge together, that's actually their fault.

The sad-funny thing is that elastics hosted cloud offering is clearly superior to AWS’ hosted elasticsearch in pretty much all regards.

It’s important to defend the product and the software ecosystem because so many people are confusing AWS’s offering with what the current state of the system is. It’s so bad that some people actually think that AWS _is_ the developer of Elasticsearch in many cases due to the Elastic-X branding similar to the I-Noun convention that Apple tried to defend against but fell short of squashing around the world. It’s also important to note that not defending one’s trademark sufficiently well means bad things in a court precedent where there needs to be reasonable, demonstrable evidence you’re not simply a patent / trademark troll sitting around waiting for someone juicy to sue rather than small fries.

Seems like you know a thing or two about this — are all the reports I see about companies leaking tons and tons of data through improperly configured elastic search instances something using the aws’s offering would fix (or even ES’s hosted offering)? I don’t really know much about the field, but if AWs’s single contribution were to be “we made it really hard to screw up the configuration and leak all your data”, I’d consider that a very deserving cause.

> Seems like you know a thing or two about this — are all the reports I see about companies leaking tons and tons of data through improperly configured elastic search instances something using the aws’s offering would fix (or even ES’s hosted offering)

The primary issue that leads to that is that the stock open source elasticsearch distribution (APL licenced) does come with no security at all. It even used to be the case that even the most basic security was a plugin that required a paid license. That changed only after AWS released the opendistro set of plugins with a free plugin to add security - after that, elastic offered a basic (free as in beer, but still non-free as in freedom) license that would include security. Additionally, the early ES versions would bind to all IPs by default, so just starting the server would make it available from outside. If you weren't expecting that and no firewall was protecting you, your ES cluster would be available from the outside with not authentication.

Both AWS and elastics hosted offering come with a configured security plugin, so that at least makes it harder to leak data. Obviously, even with authentication you can still leak credential or such.

Hm. So Elastic releases a neutered version of their product that leads to countless PII leaks, AWS provides a FOSS plug-in to fix that, then Elastic turns around and says AWS is leaching off their product and not contributing back to the community and implements a licensing change to prevent them from working together in the future? I can’t help but side with the AWS folks on this one —- I get wanting to make money, but insecure-by-default services are inexcusable, especially when it’s expected that they’ll contain PII.

Exactly! I've used AWS' service, it's awful. Elastic's is better, and price is comparable or better in fact. But the point is they don't even have to compete on price if quality is superior!

If I'm spending $100k/mo on my logging stack, and it's falling over frequently (which in AWS-land means multiple days of back and forth, opening tickets etc), I'd way rather pay $120k/mo for something that actually works.

> If I'm spending $100k/mo on my logging stack, and it's falling over frequently

I do the same and AWS ES works fine. I did try Elastic, performance was bad. They run it in containers internally!

Have you never been burned by those awful blue-green deployments?

Of course, my company was willing to pay $100k/mo to log every SQL query in existence but wasn't willing to pay for AWS support (of course it would have required paying something like 1% of our TOTAL aws spend, not just aws elasticsearch, although we could have probably created a subaccount or something)...so maybe the experience is different if your tickets actually get answered.

What was bad about performance in particular? You were just seeing less throughput per dollar spent or what?

Guys did benchmarks, AWS ES was as fast as hand rolled one, Elastic was few times slower. Searching in Kibana had substantial delay.

Yea, I got bit once by one stuck blu-green. Root cause was zero free disk space, I now keep it at 25%

And we do pay for tech support, im in luck here :)

Wouldn’t getting logs from some AWS service into Elastic’s hosted service (or anything not in AWS) be really expensive at scale though?

I believe they have an option so you can peer your VPC to their hosted offering's VPC, so logs from within your VPC don't have the typical expensive AWS internet egress/ingress costs.

While cheaper, traffic over a VPC peering is still not free.