Amazon has released Open Distro for Elasticsearch
This article is an overview of news on how:
Once upon a time there was a company Elastic.
They had several open source products :
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Elasticsearch is sometimes called ELK (elk), as an acronym of basic elements:
- E lasticsearch
- L ogStash
- K ibana
Although the components of the "L" and "K", in general, can be replaced by others: Beats, Grafana, ...
Elastic also has an X-Pack .
This is a commercial product. Some of the X-Pack features are paid (rather expensive) and some are free (but the license is still commercial).
X-Pack extends ELK features:
- security
- alerting
- monitoring
- reporting
- graph
- ...
And if you do not put the X-Pack, then there are some fairly significant opportunities. For example, by default ELK there is no authentication, then all the data "stick" out. You can tie a reverse proxy and do basic authentication (so-so option), and you can buy an X-Pack.
In June 2018 Elastic wrote an article in the spirit that we are supposedly so open that now even our commercial X-Pack is being made open .
But the people quickly realized that this was a setup.
Because starting from version 6.3 there is one repository for ELK and X-Pack , and two licenses:
And having put yourself ELK now, you never know for sure - do you have an Open Source version or a commercial one?
When you fix something in ELK and send out PR - does it go to the open part of the code or to the commercial part?
That is, Elastic made it so very difficult to install the Open Source version of ELK.
And people began to worry that if you have a commercial version of Elasticsearch, or Elasticsearch is part of your product, it may happen that you owe money.
Although some representatives of Elastic explained that this was not the case: there was a closed commercial X-Pack before, and now there is an open commercial X-Pack - how could this be worse?
For ordinary users, the case was further complicated by the fact that in the Docker images, Elastic turned on the X-Pack, which worked in Trial-mode (which was not very obvious), and after a while fell off and demanded to pay. Yes, the X-Pack in these containers could not be used, but those who are not in the subject, could get caught.
And Amazon did not seem to like the fact that since these changes, all the new features (Index Lifecycle Management, APM UI, Infrastructure and Logs UI, Kibana multi-tenancy, Kibana Canvas) Elastic began to add only under a commercial license (although often for free ) which was a prohibition to use these new features for SaaS offers, that is, just for what Amazon was doing.
March 11, 2019 Open Distro for Elasticsearch was announced on AWS blog.
As well as an article in which they explain why they released Open Distro for Elasticsearch. .
The essence of which is:
In this regard, a number of questions arise, for which they have already prepared a FAQ . These two points seemed important to me:
On the one hand, the Amazon move is considered as aggressive towards Elastic:
- Elastic is invested in the development of Elasticsearch, and makes money on this Amazon: Amazon has a number of Elasticsearch offers on its AWS Amazon.
On the other hand, Amazon writes that Elasticsearch is largely built on the success of other open source products:
- Apache Lucene, which began to develop another 11 years before Elasticsearch appeared
- Jackson for parsing JSON
- Netty, as a container for the web
- other
If Elastic can make money on other open source products, then why can't Amazon make money on Elasticsearch?
Here is an interesting discussion of this news:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359602
People write that now many Open Source developers will think twice: is it worth it to open your code under open licenses, when there are such examples of what others take this code and earn on it?
Moreover, even the “open core” model is not a panacea, because the interested party can add its code from above in the way that Amazon did for Elasticsearch.
- Amazon has released Open Distro for Elasticsearch
- Why would they do that?
- What does this mean for Elastic and for Open Source in general?
Elastic
Once upon a time there was a company Elastic.
They had several open source products :
')
- Elasticsearch itself: a server that receives, stores logs and allows searching for them
- Kibana: a frontend engine that takes data from Elasticsearch and draws beautiful reports from them
- a few more utilities that collect logs. For example LogStash
Elasticsearch is sometimes called ELK (elk), as an acronym of basic elements:
- E lasticsearch
- L ogStash
- K ibana
Although the components of the "L" and "K", in general, can be replaced by others: Beats, Grafana, ...
Elastic also has an X-Pack .
This is a commercial product. Some of the X-Pack features are paid (rather expensive) and some are free (but the license is still commercial).
X-Pack extends ELK features:
- security
- alerting
- monitoring
- reporting
- graph
- ...
And if you do not put the X-Pack, then there are some fairly significant opportunities. For example, by default ELK there is no authentication, then all the data "stick" out. You can tie a reverse proxy and do basic authentication (so-so option), and you can buy an X-Pack.
Turn 1: Elastic slyly changes license
In June 2018 Elastic wrote an article in the spirit that we are supposedly so open that now even our commercial X-Pack is being made open .
But the people quickly realized that this was a setup.
Because starting from version 6.3 there is one repository for ELK and X-Pack , and two licenses:
- for ELK - Apache 2.0
- for X-Pack - commercial license. That is, the code is now open, but you have to pay as before.
And having put yourself ELK now, you never know for sure - do you have an Open Source version or a commercial one?
When you fix something in ELK and send out PR - does it go to the open part of the code or to the commercial part?
That is, Elastic made it so very difficult to install the Open Source version of ELK.
And people began to worry that if you have a commercial version of Elasticsearch, or Elasticsearch is part of your product, it may happen that you owe money.
Although some representatives of Elastic explained that this was not the case: there was a closed commercial X-Pack before, and now there is an open commercial X-Pack - how could this be worse?
For ordinary users, the case was further complicated by the fact that in the Docker images, Elastic turned on the X-Pack, which worked in Trial-mode (which was not very obvious), and after a while fell off and demanded to pay. Yes, the X-Pack in these containers could not be used, but those who are not in the subject, could get caught.
And Amazon did not seem to like the fact that since these changes, all the new features (Index Lifecycle Management, APM UI, Infrastructure and Logs UI, Kibana multi-tenancy, Kibana Canvas) Elastic began to add only under a commercial license (although often for free ) which was a prohibition to use these new features for SaaS offers, that is, just for what Amazon was doing.
Turn 2: Amazon releases Open Distro for Elasticsearch
March 11, 2019 Open Distro for Elasticsearch was announced on AWS blog.
As well as an article in which they explain why they released Open Distro for Elasticsearch. .
The essence of which is:
- We at Amazon love Open Source and depend on many great Open Source products.
- We support and invest in Open Source
- We do not like what Elastic did. We asked them to make a clean open version of Elasticsearch and we were ready to invest, but they refused
- Therefore, we release our open (Apache 2.0) version which we call Open Distro for Elasticsearch
- And there we include many features that were in paid X-Pack. Such as security, notifications, SQL, Performance Analyzer, etc. Everything is completely open and free.
In this regard, a number of questions arise, for which they have already prepared a FAQ . These two points seemed important to me:
- Open Distro for Elasticsearch is not fork. Amazon will contribute to Elasticsearch
- Amazon will try to keep up with Elasticsearch: when Elastic releases new versions, the corresponding versions of Open Distro for Elasticsearch will be released.
Reaction, consequences
On the one hand, the Amazon move is considered as aggressive towards Elastic:
- Elastic is invested in the development of Elasticsearch, and makes money on this Amazon: Amazon has a number of Elasticsearch offers on its AWS Amazon.
On the other hand, Amazon writes that Elasticsearch is largely built on the success of other open source products:
- Apache Lucene, which began to develop another 11 years before Elasticsearch appeared
- Jackson for parsing JSON
- Netty, as a container for the web
- other
If Elastic can make money on other open source products, then why can't Amazon make money on Elasticsearch?
Here is an interesting discussion of this news:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19359602
People write that now many Open Source developers will think twice: is it worth it to open your code under open licenses, when there are such examples of what others take this code and earn on it?
Moreover, even the “open core” model is not a panacea, because the interested party can add its code from above in the way that Amazon did for Elasticsearch.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/443528/
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