> If its customers would prefer to operate an Elasticsearch service provided by AWS as opposed to Elastic, then that is a problem for Elastic to resolve.
How would you try to resolve that, if you were them?
How would you try to resolve that, if you were them?
* Since their license is Apache (most likely because they have an Open Core business model) instead of AGPL, they could offer extra services on Elastic's managed service. Amazon wouldn't able to offer since these parts are proprietary.
* They could partner up with other Cloud Providers (Microsoft, Google, ...) to offer a managed Elastic on these clouds, before these cloud providers do it themselves.
* They could offer other proprietary products that run on top of elastic (managed by them), that would force customers to use their managed service.
Cloud partnerships: https://www.elastic.co/partners/microsoft-azure https://www.elastic.co/partners/google-cloud
So that's what's really puzzling to me, what's really driving this change? Is their considerable revenue from all of that still not enough to justify their valuation and growth? Or is it really just a personal vendetta against AWS?
AWS has a lot of closed source components behind the scene that makes Elasticsearch scale and run reliably in their cloud environment.
Elastic can develop similar closed source components to make things scale – in non-aws environments – in private clouds – in on-prem deployments.
Why does this matter?
There are a lot of those customers – banks etc – who will stay on-prem and medium size cloud customer for whom public cloud is more expensive than private cloud. These are the ideal customers for Elastic.
Among them, there will also be some who will do hybrid – onprem + AWS. Elastic can price their product to compete with AWS's and use their service in both on-prem and in aws seamlessly.
I realize that the cloud took off after Elasticsearch existed, so it is hard to fault Elastic for not having a crystal ball, but the time to get the business model right was at the beginning.
When my company chose an Apache License for the product we sponsored it was because we knew we could not do it all ourselves and so we wanted to build and foster a community. So while that means competitors could and did emerge that could take the product and do a better job monetizing, that was the only way for us to get the product we needed. The community was important.
Elasticsearch would be an also-ran without the Apache License and the community around it. Changing the license now because AWS is able to monetize just stinks, IMO.