Comment by thekozmo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by thekozmo | Hacker News Reader

Kudos for AWS for the ability to launch so many services, many of them are competing with each other or complimentary.

At first I (disclosure, ScyllaDB co-founder) called their serverless a bluff but I gave it a try and it's nice to create a table without waiting for any server. That said, I know personally that Dynamo scales really slow so they wouldn't catch up the speed. It also say 1 digit ms latency but state the plan to improve jvm overhead.

Another funny thing is (regardless of tech) that AWS folks have wonderful people talking about open source but this very solution isn't open at all. It's impossible to figure out what's Cassandra and what's Dynamo. How about a diagram?

Lastly, it's pricey (for 1M iops you'll pay $3.5M/year!!) and doesn't have counters, UDT, materialized views and plenty other features.

If you got down here, hey, give ScyllaDB a try, it's OSS (AGPL) and as a service on AWS and has features that neither C* or MCS has - workload prioritization for instance. Dor

Just curious about AGPL. Do you feel that AGPL gives you a hedge against a cloud service deploying your project at scale for profit that the project would otherwise miss out on?

I ask this as someone who has been sitting on some code for 10 years for precisely this reason!

A: The "one additional feature" - Section 2(d) reads as follows: " If the Program as you received it is intended to interact with users through a computer network and if, in the version you received, any user interacting with the Program was given the opportunity to request transmission to that user of the Program's complete source code, you must not remove that facility from your modified version of the Program or work based on the Program, and must offer an equivalent opportunity for all users interacting with your Program through a computer network to request immediate transmission by HTTP of the complete source code of your modified version or other derivative work."

"This enables the original author... to download the source and receive the benefit of any modifications to its original work.

So if a cloud vendor (or anyone) decided to take your software and use it, if they made modifications to it you are entitled to get access to those modifications. For many people this is a barrier to entry -- they want the ability to modify it in however they want (which they can still do privately under AGPL). But if they offer it in public, they have to share their mods back to the community.

At least, that is my layperson's understanding of it. I am not an intellectual property lawyer and do not pretend to be.

Source: http://www.affero.org/oagf.html

The quoted language is from the long-extinct AGPLv1, which was published in the early 2000s and adopted by only a handful of projects.

Ah! Good catch. Like I said, I'm not a lawyer. :)

To some extent yes. It's not 100% protection. AGPL is just the right model, closes the loophole that GPL left. If you get to change the code, you must contribute the changes back. That's all

AGPL is viral as well. Many companies believe client libraries will also fall into AGPL scope, and therefor any apps using these clients will also have to be AGPL licensed.

So many companies ban AGPL completely.

> Dynamo scales really slow

Quite arrogant attitude, dude. DynamoDB is not slow in scaling, quite the opposite. (disclosure: 6+ years at AWS, 2008-2014, and I know the main guy that designed DynamoDB).

If you want your startup to succeed, I suggest your first step should be to avoid criticizing the competition without substantiating it with hard evidence.

Be humble. There's plenty of space for great solutions, you don't need to bash the huge elephant in the room to get started.

≥Quite arrogant attitude, dude

I find your lack of self awareness hilarious. You know the guy who designed dynamodb! Wow. Could I get you to send me his autograph?

LOLOLOL

ScyllaDB has already proven itself to be one of the fastest databases in the world, and far better than DynamoDB on scaling and efficiency.

> If you want your startup to succeed, I suggest your first step should be to avoid criticizing the competition without substantiating it with hard evidence.

From scylladb's site: Scylla Cloud vs DynamoDB benchmarks

https://www.scylladb.com/product/benchmarks/dynamodb-benchma...

AWS can launch so many services since they are not developing any of them and are just stealing the open source contributions of other companies/developers without contributing anything back.

AWS isn't stealing anything. They're hosting and running software for paying customers who want solutions to their problems, not licenses they have to run themselves. That's the whole point of managed services and the rise of cloud computing. Do you consider independent MSPs like Aiven and Instaclustr to be "stealing" too?

Vendors should compete by creating their own cloud offerings, and many are finally getting around to it.

They are disincentivizing (made up word) true open source development and using their monopoly to offer services that vendors cannot compete with easily.

I don't see how any of that is true. Customers want managed services, why aren't vendors meeting that demand?

For example, why hasn't Datastax rolled out a cloud offering on AWS yet? All this time and they have no solution. Even ScyllaDB just launched a minimal service this year. I would expect a db vendor to be able to wire up some APIs and at least get a basic deployment running instead of complaining about AWS offering it first.

DataStax made a major deal with Google instead:

https://www.datastax.com/platform/google-cloud-platform

It's not a great implementation, the biggest advantage is consolidated billing. Unfortunately it's also ignoring the biggest cloud so they have no excuse against AWS launching this service.

Even when they do, there is a problem. They specialize in DB code. AWS specializes in infra... and can just take the DB code as well. That is a pretty huge competitive advantage (while the db company has to develop that second specialty). Even worse, there's the further monopoly advantage that companies can just role it into their AWS bill instead of doing another vendor evaluation. The fact that Amazon has almost all the competitive advantages for offering someone else's code it what seems unfair.

(the one they don't have is the ability to offer super specialized support and modifications for their customers, which is where a lot of the database companies have made their money - on consulting)

The DB vendor who created the database is worse at running it than AWS? No, that isn't true.

If you don't want others using your source code then don't be open source or use a different license. There are thousands of closed proprietary products out there doing just fine, for example all of AWS own managed services.

Right. But we want open source to be strong and Amazon is undermining it. You don't care, but we do.

That's a repeat of the same statement. Exactly how is it being undermined? Nothing is stopping you from working on open-source software.

> For example, why hasn't Datastax rolled out a cloud offering on AWS yet?

Umm... they do (https://www.datastax.com/platform/amazon-web-services). Instacluster also has an offering. Which kind of highlights the problem.

Didn't see that before. Still a poor implementation compared to what's available. And I mentioned Instaclustr, so if you're fine with them offering Cassandra then AWS is no different.

My point is that there is a reality that AWS can offer even a crummier, more expensive version than someone else, and it will still garner the $'s.

Sure, because that's what customers are fine with. Again the argument has nothing to do with open-source. Everyone has the same challenges when competing with a bigger company selling the same thing.

It's not because they are bigger.

Even when Amazon wasn't the largest company on the planet, anyone offering services on AWS had a hell of a time competing on equal footing with AWS offering a similar, if inferior, version of the service. It's not unlike when Microsoft was competing with application vendors... except in the case of open-source you're competing with your own code.

Because they have limited resources and have to support existing customers? And they were doing the right thing by contributing everything back to the open source community and weren't expecting Amazon to offer a service?

That's called business competition. Should startups shut down because a bigger company might be selling the same thing?

There's no expectation of contribution with open-source software and the vast majority of users don't add anything. That's how it goes. If you don't want to give it away, then simply don't give it away.

DB vendors earn revenue by charging for features, support and services, just like AWS. There's nothing stopping them from selling proprietary closed-source products and I can name dozens that are doing well.

"There's no expectation of contribution with open-source software and the vast majority of users don't add anything. That's how it goes. If you don't want to give it away, then simply don't give it away." - Vendors are wising up to it now and changing their licenses. Amazon definitely took advantage of this before the days of AGPL. I agree that there's no expectation of contribution. As I said before, it just discourages open source in general because of what Amazon might do. My original comment was in response to someone asking how Amazon is able to launch these services quickly. My response was that the bulk of the work is being done by someone else. I guess that's not new. On the retail side, Amazon takes products that sell well and then offer an Amazon Basics version of the same product.

As did millions of other users and companies. If you give away source code then people will probably use it. Don't do it if you don't want that to happen.

If they're changing licenses now then good for them, but you could say they also took advantage of the free marketing from open-source and now put most of the development into enterprise versions. There's no right vs wrong side here.

There's a difference between people using it and making money off it. What Amazon is doing is putting a wrapper around other people's hard work and claiming it as their own.

They've never "claimed" anything like that. What does it matter who worked on it? They gave it away. Don't do that if you don't want to.

Do you also have a complaint against the numerous vendors offering managed Postgres? Or is this just relegated to some databases you specifically like?

Looks like the Amazon Mechanical Turk workers are out in full force to downvote.

Posts complaining about downvoting are boring.

I kept mine short so that people don't waste too much time.

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