Re:Cracks are showing in Enterprise Open Source's foundations
by ddevault on Thursday January 28, 2021 @12:47PM
(#25945585)
It's not that hard to compete with AWS. AWS is scatterbrained and provides a really bad UX and as-is integrations where the "is" is not great. You might lose some business to them, but the cases we've seen lately aren't that: Elastic cleared almost half a billion dollars last year.
What open source does mean is surrendering your monopoly over what you build. Amazon may capture some of your value as a result, but that's part of the deal. I wrote about it here:
https://drewdevault.com/2021/01/20/FOSS-is-to-surrender-your...
Re:Cracks are showing in Enterprise Open Source's foundations
by andor on Friday January 29, 2021 @07:10AM
(#25956461)
"It's not that hard to compete with AWS. AWS is scatterbrained and provides a really bad UX and as-is integrations where the "is" is not great."
A lot of enterprise buying decisions come down to: "AWS/Azure/... is already an approved vendor, so let's just buy from them instead of going through the hoops to get Elastic approved". The "super scalers" are offering a path of least resistance that is difficult to overcome.
The big problem with this is that most of the large enterprises which are really spending the money for this, 99% of the time are going to pick Amazon or Microsoft or IBM for hosting/support over AwesomeOpenSourceLibrary LLC, especially since they likely already have contracts with those companies.
From a practical point of view, if I have N open source libraries that I use in production, as a large company, it is better for me if I have Amazon support all N libraries, than having N different contracts with N different companies for support/hosting.