The Elasticsearch Saga Continues
thenewstack.io
thenewstack.io
ES should focus on competing be with DDOG/App Dynamics and other incumbents in SIEM space. I dont understand, why would they get into petty fights with AWS.
How many people does AWS have people working on their version of elasticsearch? and on the client libraries in various languages?
From previous discussions on HN, I was under the impression that the answer is very little if any.
My bet is that AWS will keep the service as it is now and never makes patches or upgrades. That's how they operate services usually. And it's not that bad to be fair, the product is good enough as it is.
Regardless of whatever beef is going on between AWS and Elastic, they could at least have the professional courtesy not to ship breaking changes in a minor release.
https://www.polygon.com/2020/2/21/21147664/crytek-star-citiz...
I had used AWS hosted Elasticsearch and it's subpar even at fundamental level. That signal to me they just don't care at all about search and this whole opensearch thing is just they want to be look like a good guy.
If AWS doesn't even care about their own UI/UX of the dashboard or the UX of their API, how can I expect them to do a good job at Elasticsearch? They right now still ride on the high and stay close to ES, but the further into the future, when they drift from ES, expect to have a crappy API from them.
In fact, looking at the Github Opensearch repo for Es and dashboard(Kibana equivalent) they are clearly less active than ES. So how can we expect them to keep the pace in next few year?
I get annoyed a little when people try to ascribe a feeling to a large group. I don’t think “the open source community” was dismayed about either of these actions.
I do. A major piece of software suddenly stopped being open source.
Give em some time to grow.
Elastic's playbook is almost diametrically opposed to this: they need to prove that they're worth paying a premium for, over AWS' offering. The repo activity clearly shows that they're working on more stuff, building faster, whatever signals you want to glean from that. Change is happening, and if it's good change I can see the gambit AWS is pushing turn into a losing proposition.
The endgame for Elastic is a partnership on AWS, on "equal" terms; license fees, a cut of the profits, the whole shebang. The endgame for AWS is an end to Elastic as a company, but not heavily increased profits one way or another - AWS still gets its cut if Elastic succeeds.
The incentive models aren't equal here, and that's what kills AWS' agenda. I'm not affiliated with either company, so I don't have any inside info, but I have to imagine that Elastic will succeed here in carving out a niche for themselves - unless there's been a silent exodus from the company I understand that these are smart folks building software under, shall we say, extrenuous motivational circumstances. A little stress is good for productivity :)
As an Elastic customer managing my own cluster, the main issue I have with their approach, and the main reason I'm tempted to switch to OpenSearch, is their all-or-nothing license model.
We only use ES as a place to centralize logs, look them up, maybe whip up a dashboard now and then. No fancy ML or what have you. We don't (yet?) care for those. But we also need access control. There's no such thing in the free version, so we have to pay up quite a hefty sum. We could also get by with 3 data nodes. Tough. Minimum is five. We'd really like it to have some kind of SSO, like pretty much all our other apps. We'd have to pay up even more.
So yeah, we'd be getting all kinds of ML-laden features and whatever. So what? Those bring 0 value to us today.
So my thinking is, what if OpenSearch doesn't have the latest and greatest features? Aside from a few things around snapshot management, I was never really interested in those. Plus the license premium is so huge compared to our usage, we could just be spinning a tad bigger VMs and keep everything on-line.
I wonder how many clients like us they are alienating with, what looks to me, a petty war. But as someone said on some other threads on this subject, Elastic isn't a mom-and-pop company, so our annual license costs are probably pocket change for them.
If I had to make a short list. Data streams, index lifecycle management and security on top of the OSS distribution of ES is all I need to view and manage K8S pod logs.
Worth noting that the developers of searchguard which the Opensearch / Opendistro security plugin is based on is also being sued by Elastic.
Huh, didn't know that. I really doubt their "threat" is in any way comparable to AWS. This really doesn't help whatever goodwill they had left...
ES the company is going after people who want all the latest bells and whistles and geegaws, and are willing to build and maintain their own ES clusters to make that happen.
Yes, there’s some overlap in the middle, but not much.
And no matter how bad the ES service is on AWS, it will always have a large customer base who will choose it, simply because it’s good enough, as well as easier and lower administrative overhead.
The OpenSearch thing is new. So far as I know, they didn’t create their own forks of MySQL or Postgres and then try to build communities around that. But that is what they’re doing with OpenSearch. IMO, that’s a mistake. They’re better off working with the ES community and contributing changes back to an existing community, as opposed to trying to build and maintain their own separate but equal community.
Sometimes forks are a good idea. Sometimes not. Sometimes those forks live on, and sometimes not. This is a case where I think the fork is a bad idea, I believe it is likely to not live on, and I think a lot of harm will be done on both sides of that war, above and beyond whatever else might have happened if they had just chosen to support the existing ES community.
But that’s just my personal opinion.
With this in mind what could Amazon do? Their options were: A. Stop selling their Elasticsearch service, or B. Fork Elasticsearch.
This change from Elastic is really shitty though, and sort of proves that all their finger pointing at Amazon saying that they're acting against the spirit of open source was all bullshit.
Not very many by my count; something like 2 patches/month on average. I mean, of course this is great, but there are several ES-based companies that contributed more, and about >95% of ES was written by Elastic.
Nope.
I'm not sure what the numbers are, but Elasticsearch is based on Lucene, so a large chuck of what makes up Elasticsearch predates Elasticsearch.
Lucene is not included in this; as far as I can tell it's just imported as a dependency. I mean, obviously Lucene is an important part, but by this standard something like "Jane Doe wrote about half of Docker" would also be "wrong" because we'd have to count the people who worked on cgroups and all the other Linux stuff Docker uses, all the Go dependencies, etc. Realistically, almost everything we do is based on various things other people did. "To make an apple pie from scratch we must first invent the universe."
Maybe that would be fairer/better to also count Lucene, but that's a different discussion and wasn't really my point, which was that almost all code in the ElasticSearch GitHub repo comes from Elastic employees, that Amazon never contributed all that much code, and that based on this plus the severely reduced levels of activity of OpenSearch vs. Elastic don't really paint the most rosy long-term prospect for OpenSearch vs. ElasticSearch.
[1]: https://lobste.rs/s/qtsjh1/elasticsearch_does_not_belong_ela...
MySQL and Postgres are still open source. ElasticSearch is not.
They changed the license but its still open source
From https://opensource.org/osd
> 6. No Discrimination Against Fields of Endeavor > The license must not restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor. For example, it may not restrict the program from being used in a business, or from being used for genetic research.
Does elastic have something like it?