Companies are much more likely to just go with AWS Aurora than to consider CockroachDB at this point.
I'm still amazed as how promising open source projects continue to undermine themselves with this "commons clause" movement. I hope something good comes out of it but I'm pessimistic.
While they are experts in the technology they've created, offering a managed service is much more than just having awesome developers. Not to mention some companies have other restrictions (on premises, local presence, etc, etc, etc).
For a customer, unless I'm completely sold on their technology and really need it for my company, they just added a restriction on my choices.
I don't think this is the case, a third party can provide hosted CockroachDB provided they license it from Cockroach Labs.
>"The one and only thing that you cannot do is offer a commercial version of CockroachDB as a service without buying a license."
Again, IANAL.
Right now their sales chat can't say how much that would cost.
It seem an alternative could be to provide something like a cPanel-like thing that would enable other companies to easily offer CockroachDB DBaaS solutions. That's adding value rather than subtracting.
Their new license doesn't forbid others from offering a managed service. It simply requires the managed provider to pay them for a license. AWS, GCP, etc can still create a managed service.
Cockroach Labs is not your only option; you can also use other providers that have a license agreement with us. Our first partner in this area is ObjectRocket: https://www.objectrocket.com/blog/cockroachdb/introducing_co...
Financially, we pay AWS for EC2 instances and other expenses + them on top of that for consulting service, they have root access to the cluster. We do not have any devops/infra guy in the office.
Would they be allowed to install (and manage) CockroachDB on our cluster if we need to ?