[toomuchtodo]

> Elastic (Apache licensed) has actually had their lunch eaten by Amazon to a much larger degree. Many businesses are purchasing hosted ES instances directly from Amazon via Amazon Elasticsearch service. The problem is bad enough that Elastic Inc had to write a marketing blog post about it [0].

Also the reason Redis Labs made the controversial decision to change their licensing (and they reference Elastic in it) [1].

[1] https://redislabs.com/blog/redis-license-bsd-will-remain-bsd...

> Cloud providers have been taking advantage of the open source community for years by selling (for hundreds of millions of dollars) cloud services based on open source code they didn’t develop (e.g. Docker, Spark, Hadoop, Redis, Elasticsearch and others). This discourages the community from investing in developing open source code, because any potential benefit goes to cloud providers rather than the code developer or their sponsor.

[busterarm]

A big part of it is Elastic's fuckup.

It's a big deal for a lot of companies to be able to pay the cloud bill in one place. Elastic used to provide the availability to pay for the Elastic cloud subscription through AWS' Marketplace. Elastic stopped this when they changed their pricing at the beginning of 2017 and we (my last employer) were negotiating a contract with them at the time. AWS billing was a hard requirement for us because it made it a lot easier on us from the finance side. We walked and I know a lot of others who did too.

[toomuchtodo]

It’s not Elastic’s fault your accounts payable process is deficient.

[busterarm]

I'd be surprised if even 20% of companies' accounts payable process is sufficient.

The point is that AWS removes friction and Elastic chose to add friction. They're chasing big Enterprise hard and it doesn't seem to be working out.

[toomuchtodo]

It’s a business decision of course. Forge your own path or be beholden to your revenue model dictated by AWS.

Big Enterprise will not require billing through AWS (disclaimer: employed at a large enterprise, buying ~$900k software license currently). They’ll have an accounts payable department, a procurement process, and someone to cut a check or ACH to Elastic monthly/annually.

[busterarm]

It wasn't the way they did billing, it was just an option. One they've removed. I get it, I'm just saying it cost them some money.

[toomuchtodo]

I totally get that. I don't dispute that. But if you must choose between "please sir, can I have some more?" and controlling your own revenue destiny, it is clear why some would choose the later.

Would you want to be beholden to AWS' whims? You might as well be a Walmart supplier at that point, constantly dragged out to Bentonville having to make your case for every penny of your costs. Amazon has proven its model (all about scale), how it operates (your margin = our opportunity), and you partner with them at your own peril.

I'm suggesting the thought process to shift from, "Ahhh, those Elastic guys and their bad decisions!" to "Hmm, well, tough decision to make [forgoing revenue through AWS] but I understand why they made it".

[toast0]

It's not elastic's fault, but it is elastic's problem if they can't get paid.

[itronitron]

Can someone explain why a company would pay a cloud provider extra to manage an open source API for them when they could just run it in the cloud themselves?

[toomuchtodo]

Cheaper than spending the time doing it yourself until you’re paying people to do it for you.

Time is the ultimate non-renewable resource. Throw dollars at the problem when you have them and it’s cheaper than your time.

[itronitron]

I think a lot of companies have a hard time managing that transition as they scale up though.