Okay, I understand that the burden of correctly supporting the internal gossip protocol is very high.
It's a shame though, because it makes it harder for medium-sized installations to convert. If you're running a small cluster, then getting a few more machines to test it out isn't that much of a burden. If you're so big that you have multiple clusters, you can probably roll through and upgrade cluster by cluster or keyspace by keyspace or something.
But between those two there's a medium size installation where an upgrade to ScyllaDB is a serious project that would eat up a sizeable chunk of the server budget just to test it out, and the ability to do a server-by-server upgrade of a running cluster would be invaluable.
On the other hand, that type of customer probably wouldn't be interested in premium support either, so there's probably little incentive for you to support that scenario over the large installation scenario. And that's totally fair, I might as well be wishing for unicorns and rainbows. :-)
On another note, DataStax recently announced that they'll be discontinuing the free version of OpsCenter from Cassandra 3.0 and forward. So you have a shot at grabbing people that are stuck on 2.x, because if there's a cost to upgrading anyway, and if you could offer something better than OpsCenter, your alternative might look very tempting indeed.
Supporting the gossip protocol is hard, but so is supporting everything else. A more interesting question here is: if there is a bug in the gossip protocol, Cassandra side, and the addition of a different implementation of the same protocol happens to trash your cluster, who do you blame? How long until you find out?
That sounds like a support nightmare. We're willing to revisit this in the future, but I think it is an unlikely development.
It's a shame though, because it makes it harder for medium-sized installations to convert. If you're running a small cluster, then getting a few more machines to test it out isn't that much of a burden. If you're so big that you have multiple clusters, you can probably roll through and upgrade cluster by cluster or keyspace by keyspace or something.
But between those two there's a medium size installation where an upgrade to ScyllaDB is a serious project that would eat up a sizeable chunk of the server budget just to test it out, and the ability to do a server-by-server upgrade of a running cluster would be invaluable.
On the other hand, that type of customer probably wouldn't be interested in premium support either, so there's probably little incentive for you to support that scenario over the large installation scenario. And that's totally fair, I might as well be wishing for unicorns and rainbows. :-)
On another note, DataStax recently announced that they'll be discontinuing the free version of OpsCenter from Cassandra 3.0 and forward. So you have a shot at grabbing people that are stuck on 2.x, because if there's a cost to upgrading anyway, and if you could offer something better than OpsCenter, your alternative might look very tempting indeed.