true - but that's exactly how it out-competes. It's a repeating pattern. Setting up an agreement with a 3rd party provider has friction. The bigger the client, the higher the friction. If $BIGCO has an enterprise agreement with $BIGCLOUD, then $SERVICE hosted on $BIGCLOUD is nearly always going to win against $SERVICE's own commercial offering.
Right, but that's the sort of setup that's detrimental to society and therefore we ought to consider regulating or otherwise setting up an environment that is disadvantageous to it.
Why do enterprises make it difficult to add a new vendor? Because they are careful with their data and legal obligations. Regulatory and auditing obligations are no joke and onboarding a new vendor is a nontrivial problem to do in a compliant fashion. The only aspect of this which is "detrimental to society" arguably is the legal requirements, but even then you might argue its better for a large organization to pay attention to other companies' licenses instead of stepping on them.
spot on. The lesson for would-be companies formed around open source is pretty stark: if your stuff is any good, then assume the clould vendors will offer it. If they do, it's going to be really hard for you to compete with a separate commercial offering.
Not only has the cloud vendor already gone through the hoops of getting an enterprise agreement in place. They're also big, and recognised, and know how to deal with Procurement. And Risk. And Compliance. And Legal.
Not saying I like that situation. It does seem unjust that the big guys can just cherry-pick good products and monetise them without giving anything back. It offends my sense of fairness. But that's commercial reality, at least in today's markets.
The whole reason I would choose an open-source tech against closed source is so that I can go to whoever I want for support and future enhancement, that I'm not dependent on this tiny company for my business continuity. Sometimes that tiny founding company may not be the best to offer the kind of support and enhancements I need.
A real personal example I experienced: at one time, the founding team behind a project I happened to use at work actually told me they didn't want to do the enhancement I was asking for because my particular scale-out needs were too niche and none of their other paying customers need that and they didn't have the engineering bandwidth to build my feature (the opportunity cost for them was too high to abandon building features needed by their other customers).
So I had to solve this scale-out problem by myself - which was painful (we had high opportunity cost too).
In that situation, if my cloud vendor were to say they would solve that problem for me as they would be willing to invest whatever engineering bandwidth required to make it happen, then I would go with them.
Now if that happens a few times, the cloud vendor's service offering will be much superior to the original project founding team's offering.
Over time, the cloud vendor's offering will also be cheaper.
Of course the trick here is to be watchful of being sucked into a lock-in by the cloud vendor. You will have to insist that all of the features they are doing for you are actually open-source and portable to another cloud. Many companies define such requirements as part of their procurement process and audit for it.
As more companies start to push for such guardrail requirements to prevent cloud lock-in, the open-source commercial support model may still have a chance – but unfortunately that doesn't necessarily mean the project founding company will do well.
> In that situation, if my cloud vendor were to say they would solve that problem for me as they would be willing to invest whatever engineering bandwidth required to make it happen, then I would go with them.
Aren't cloud vendors generally less willing then smaller SAAS companies to do custom engineering work for their customers?
The other way in which they are detrimental to society is by taking revenue away from companies such as elastic that are actually developing technology. In general there is economic hazard with any large company. There are also benefits and I don't think they should be eliminated entirely. But I do think they should be curtailed and the economy biased towards smaller companies.
The key enabler here is IAM and data (at rest and moving).
If we want to encourage free markets, the GDPR et al. need to be very careful to disincentivize "traffic within different parts of the same entity."
As is, if my regulatory compliance is satisfied through AWS's data and IAM handling, then if an Amazon-hosted service better integrates with those components, it strictly dominates competition.
That's a pretty unregulatable quality, and one easily optimized by Amazon (for itself), and impossibly by everyone else (on Amazon).
This weaponizes data protection regulation into a moat around large everything-and-the-kitchen-sink I/PaaS providers.
There needs to be balance between (a) protecting data & (b) ensuring a competitive ecosystem with multiple viable solutions.
