<story><title>OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/introducing-opensearch/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amzn-throw</author><text>&amp;gt; they can invest more resources into developing it than the original team ever could.&lt;p&gt;I know this is a popular narrative, but as someone who works on AWS, I think you would be shocked by how small the individual dev teams are that build and maintain the services that everyone uses.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not going to downplay the network effects involved. Of course AWS has a tremendous advantage in being able to standardize the customer billing, IAM, and EC2 Usage.&lt;p&gt;And there are economies of scale.&lt;p&gt;But individual AWS service teams are:
* incredibly lean and focused
* still have to make a profit on their own terms based on the infrastructure they build and the fees they charge customers 
* laser customer obsessed to solve people&amp;#x27;s (developer&amp;#x27;s) direct needs.&lt;p&gt;I understand the community&amp;#x27;s concern about AWS investment and approach to OSS. But I can assure you (though you have no reason to believe me) that the goal is never to embrace, extend, then extinguish. It&amp;#x27;s all in the service of going where the customers are, and solving problems that they tell us they have. The profits are a byproduct. The &amp;quot;working backwards&amp;quot; process is no joke. We spend a lot of time figuring out what is the right thing for customers to build, start building it, and THEN we think about how do we make money from it.</text></item><item><author>TechBro8615</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s hard for me to know whether to feel bad for ES in this case. Did they bring it on themselves? Is Amazon too big and a bully?&lt;p&gt;From my perspective, Amazon has made most of its profit price gouging consumers on bandwidth after vendor locking them into their ecosystem, where they bootstrap new services by wrapping open source software with some provisioning scripts, management dashboards and cookie-cutter API &amp;#x2F; console templates. Indeed, most of this is templated -- AFAIU, for example, each AWS service autogenerates its Boto bindings and parts of its console frontend via code generators. Amazon has really mastered the factory process of churning out new services, and when they find a popular one, they can invest more resources into developing it than the original team ever could.&lt;p&gt;And therein lies the rub. If Amazon is improving the software in a way that the original team couldn&amp;#x27;t, it&amp;#x27;s hard to say that the community isn&amp;#x27;t benefiting. I think what strikes me the wrong way is that Amazon is not doing it for any altruistic reason. In fact, Amazon contributes very little to open source in general, considering how much they take from it. Compare them to Facebook (React, etc) or Google (tons of dev tools) or Microsoft (VSC, TypeScript). What does Amazon have? Firecracker, kind of? And now a fork of ES because that&amp;#x27;s the only way they could continue making money off it without violating the license a small startup put in place to stop them?&lt;p&gt;Well, good for Amazon, I suppose, but I find myself instinctively disliking them for this. I&amp;#x27;m not sure what the solution is. Hopefully technologies like Kubernetes and Terraform will encourage big customers to become at least cloud-agnostic, if not cloud-independent. At the very least it would be great if Amazon &amp;#x2F; Google &amp;#x2F; Microsoft stopped gouging bandwidth at such absurd margins. Or not. Maybe it will be their downfall as startups differentiate along those lines. That would be ironic, coming from the originators of &amp;quot;your margin is my opportunity.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Personally I&amp;#x27;m doing my part by not building anything with vendor lock-in. It&amp;#x27;s great to be able to deploy to any cloud, if you value either robustness or flexibility.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>throwdbaaway</author><text>I was nodding along until this:&lt;p&gt;&amp;gt; and THEN we think about how do we make money from it&lt;p&gt;Do you really need to think? Looking at the on-demand pricing in US East, a m5.4xlarge.elasticsearch instance costs $1.133 an hour, while a m5.4xlarge instance costs $0.768 an hour. That&amp;#x27;s 47.53% of extra money. And like you said, it only requires a small team to build and maintain the service.&lt;p&gt;It is no coincidence that all cloud providers are trying to ramp up their hosted services for open source software, even GCP, who historically only focused on their own proprietary stack. There&amp;#x27;s a lot of money to be made.</text></comment>
<story><title>OpenSearch: AWS fork of Elasticsearch and Kibana</title><url>https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/opensource/introducing-opensearch/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>amzn-throw</author><text>&amp;gt; they can invest more resources into developing it than the original team ever could.&lt;p&gt;I know this is a popular narrative, but as someone who works on AWS, I think you would be shocked by how small the individual dev teams are that build and maintain the services that everyone uses.&lt;p&gt;I&amp;#x27;m not going to downplay the network effects involved. Of course AWS has a tremendous advantage in being able to standardize the customer billing, IAM, and EC2 Usage.&lt;p&gt;And there are economies of scale.&lt;p&gt;But individual AWS service teams are:
* incredibly lean and focused
* still have to make a profit on their own terms based on the infrastructure they build and the fees they charge customers 
* laser customer obsessed to solve people&amp;#x27;s (developer&amp;#x27;s) direct needs.&lt;p&gt;I understand the community&amp;#x27;s concern about AWS investment and approach to OSS. But I can assure you (though you have no reason to believe me) that the goal is never to embrace, extend, then extinguish. It&amp;#x27;s all in the service of going where the customers are, and solving problems that they tell us they have. The profits are a byproduct. The &amp;quot;working backwards&amp;quot; process is no joke. We spend a lot of time figuring out what is the right thing for customers to build, start building it, and THEN we think about how do we make money from it.</text></item><item><author>TechBro8615</author><text>It&amp;#x27;s hard for me to know whether to feel bad for ES in this case. Did they bring it on themselves? Is Amazon too big and a bully?&lt;p&gt;From my perspective, Amazon has made most of its profit price gouging consumers on bandwidth after vendor locking them into their ecosystem, where they bootstrap new services by wrapping open source software with some provisioning scripts, management dashboards and cookie-cutter API &amp;#x2F; console templates. Indeed, most of this is templated -- AFAIU, for example, each AWS service autogenerates its Boto bindings and parts of its console frontend via code generators. Amazon has really mastered the factory process of churning out new services, and when they find a popular one, they can invest more resources into developing it than the original team ever could.&lt;p&gt;And therein lies the rub. If Amazon is improving the software in a way that the original team couldn&amp;#x27;t, it&amp;#x27;s hard to say that the community isn&amp;#x27;t benefiting. I think what strikes me the wrong way is that Amazon is not doing it for any altruistic reason. In fact, Amazon contributes very little to open source in general, considering how much they take from it. Compare them to Facebook (React, etc) or Google (tons of dev tools) or Microsoft (VSC, TypeScript). What does Amazon have? Firecracker, kind of? And now a fork of ES because that&amp;#x27;s the only way they could continue making money off it without violating the license a small startup put in place to stop them?&lt;p&gt;Well, good for Amazon, I suppose, but I find myself instinctively disliking them for this. I&amp;#x27;m not sure what the solution is. Hopefully technologies like Kubernetes and Terraform will encourage big customers to become at least cloud-agnostic, if not cloud-independent. At the very least it would be great if Amazon &amp;#x2F; Google &amp;#x2F; Microsoft stopped gouging bandwidth at such absurd margins. Or not. Maybe it will be their downfall as startups differentiate along those lines. That would be ironic, coming from the originators of &amp;quot;your margin is my opportunity.&amp;quot;&lt;p&gt;Personally I&amp;#x27;m doing my part by not building anything with vendor lock-in. It&amp;#x27;s great to be able to deploy to any cloud, if you value either robustness or flexibility.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>waynesonfire</author><text>they have as many people dedicated to the capability as needed. at least the capabilities have owners, which from my experience is not trivial for an organization to achieve.&lt;p&gt;curious if others have noticed this as well (capabilities without clear owners)? what does this depend on? time? company size? both?</text></comment>