Hacker News Reader

Comment by alittletooraph | Hacker News Reader

Have you heard of Amazon Elasticsearch Service, launched in 2015? Elastic is doing fine.

This is hopefully a good counterexample. Amazon's Elasticsearch Service is pretty bad (poor general performance, very slow to make cluster changes/launch new clusters, etc).

But I can't help but think Amazon can and would easily fix those things if they mattered. Amazon's hosted Elasticsearch is a lot cheaper than Elastic's, and I'll bet that's enough to get people to use it.

> poor general performance

By poor performance, I assume you mean IO? AWS Elasticsearch has supported i3 instance type (nvme on-instance storage) for well over a year now [0]. Additionally, you could enable slow-logs to catch perf issues yourself [1]

> very slow to make cluster changes

Scale-out and access-policy changes happen in-place now and so happen much faster than they used to be.

> launch new clusters

In my experience, it depends on the cluster size, but usually, I see cluster being up in 20m. That's nice given that it sets up pretty much everything (spin up instances, apply access policies, run health checks, enable cloudwatch monitoring, snapshots, create route53 records, integrate with cognito, enc-at-rest via KMS, spin up load balancers, setup vpc resources etc) on my behalf.

[0] https://docs.aws.amazon.com/elasticsearch-service/latest/dev...

[1] https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/database/analyzing-amazon-elast...

Actually not IO performance, but mostly CPU. Last time I tested (which admittedly was about a year ago), an AWS ES cluster was about 20% slower than a self-made cluster with the same instance types. Given that AWS ES clusters still cannot use C5 instances, which offer FAR better cost/$, the performance disparity today might be even larger.

I can also launch an Elasticsearch cluster myself in about 2 minutes via terraform, so 20 minutes is not super impressive.

That said I recognize Elasticsearch is actually quite a finicky beast to set up, and my setup only has to deal with the needs I have, and probably would be set up horribly for certain other people. I can see how a hosted system that has to deal with all the weird edge-cases of a few thousand customers would take longer to set things up.

Elastic Co isn’t profitable by definition it isn’t “doing fine”.

From their SEC filing:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1707753/000119312518...

We have a history of losses and may not be able to achieve profitability or positive cash flows on a consistent basis. If we cannot achieve profitability or positive cash flows, our business, financial condition, and results of operations may suffer.

You're right they're not profitable — and neither is MongoDB — but the point is that AWS launched an Elasticsearch service 3 years prior to Elastic having a very successful IPO supported by stellar metrics (also found in the SEC filing you linked). So the statements made at the beginning of this thread are probably a bit premature.

Only in tech do people think that a money losing company is “successful” because they were able to convince investors to buy stock instead of defining success as having a business model where income is greater than expenses.

In reality long term profitability is the only metric that matters for a corporation

And in contrast to these startups with their "success" AWS is printing cash for amazon which releases surprisingly few "metrics" beyond $ in and $ out.

And at the end of the day. What else matters when measuring whether a profit seeking corporation is successful?

Literally every S1 filing will have some sort of language like that. They are required to list the risks that may harm them.

They haven’t shown a profit yet. So you don’t have any proof that they have a sustainable business model.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com