That said, the acquisition by Amazon is interesting in that it seems to overlap with their existing DB offerings? Which makes me wonder what exactly it is that they are getting out of this.
I can't think of many other languages/frameworks where one of the worst places to install it is from the primary sponsor/maintainer.
Of the few examples I have I my head, I'd even say that the fate of a product that has been acquired by Google is probably even better than those of Google's internally developed products. e.g. Waze is still alive and kicking 13 years after acquisition under its own brand and hasn't been completely swallowed by Google Maps. The Nest brand also stuck around for quite some time.
Amazon will drive these people to quit within a couple years over filling out MBRs and threats about how the MBR isn't good enough (MBR = monthly business report, pure bullshit theatre that drives the whole company mad 2/4 weeks every month).
Google would drive them to quit over a longer timeframe, with no threats or harrassment, just because every time they try to ship something cool, someone else has a reason not to do it and that kills you eventually.
Yeah, I've never personally worked at any of those places, but collaborated on a few open source projects with Googlers and Xooglers and the slow grinding wheels of their "processes" that wear people down over time were very apparent. Nevertheless, it has been a breeding ground for many interesting technologies, even if it often suffocates them over the long term.
Wouldn't be possible nowadays to LLM your way out of this?
Really no idea, just asking.
Honestly, the whole thing felt LLM to start with, tons of people lacking context and throwing words and summaries around.
Couldn't have said it any better myself having worked at AWS for close to 8y. I was there during their peak growth years and remember very well how some of these processes that were once not as maddening, devolved.
If I had 5 million I’m going to retire and never code for money again.
I do want to make small video games though, make some music. Pay for a friend’s kids college.
I wouldn’t waste a single extra hour making more money. Usually the golden handcuffs fall off after a year or two. That’s why Heroku went to crap, all the core people left.
Heck AWS is the sole reason all these projects needed to go through these license changes to prevent AWS from completely destroying their business models.
Weirdly I’d put Microsoft above modern-Google, and that’s still a low bar.
You might think that's got a very low ceiling. But, even though it's a bad example in many ways, OpenAI showed that the ceiling is very high. And if you're morally flexible even higher.
When a bigger entity (e.g. AWS) decides to undercut the original creator/vendor (e.g. redis,elastic search), MIT code des not help.
I know some lawyers who specialize in these choices. Everyone thinks their choice doesn't smell, but there are the resources to make informed choices.
There the question turns to "you may sue me, if it breaks" as reasoning. In reality sueing will rarely work, but having a business contract satisfies the company's board and insurance about using the software over an "AS IS"-license alone.
I don't know how you came to OpenAI as an example given that they famously succeeded while going closed-source with the release of ChatGPT.
I can't speak to how successful it is, but Daniel/Curl have been running with this model[0][1] for years. Probably not too different from 'drh and SQLite[2][3].
[0] https://curl.se/support.html
[1] https://rock-solid.curl.dev/
You really underestimate the value of support contracts.
100 items max per Transaction BatchGet 100 items, 16 MB max low write limits on same key Item size 400 KB max etc.
1. You're selling a system to a customer to use within their own AWS account, that you will have no access to, and it needs a transactional datastore (not just an object bucket) of some kind. The fact that it costs nothing by default (particularly valuable when the customer is trying to deploy a proof-of-concept), scales more-or-less perfectly without anybody touching it, requires zero day-to-day maintenance by you or the customer, and all it will ever ask is that you throw money at it, is very, very much a feature. One example I'm familiar with in the wild is Teleport: https://goteleport.com/docs/reference/deployment/backends/#d...
2. You have a huge OLTP workload that fits Dynamo's KV patterns (e.g. Amazon.com shopping carts, which is what it was originally built for). You don't care how much DynamoDB costs (in either dollars or engineering limitations) because any alternative would melt your face off if you even tried.
Most of the pain that comes from Dynamo is people who try to use it as a primary datastore in place of a relational database just to get the serverless pricing model. It's not worth giving up the flexibility on greenfield systems. It does become worth it to give up the flexibility when your system is mature and you don't have genuine flexibility anymore anyway.
The constraints are what let this happen. Unconstraining it might make a better generalist product but part of what you're opting into with DDB is the dumb "put an item in get an item out semantics" and the other side is knowing that it will still work if that volume increases dramatically.
For the same price, you can run a much more capable PSQL instance with way better features, but now you're on the hook for it being up 24/7.
I wish I could get a role to work on OLTP databases. PostgreSQL seems to be a fascinating topic so that's on my plate.
One blog says it is charged by the amount of change logs (but the official doc doesn't say so), which makes sense. But how do I estimate the amount? My hunch is: Put + Write + (1~100) * TransitWrite + Update + Delete + (1~25) * BatchWrite.
For example, I want to know how to calculate the charge of incremental export. One blog says it is charged by the amount of change logs (but the official doc doesn't say so), which makes sense. But how do I estimate the amount? My hunch is: Put + Write + (1~100) * TransitWrite + Update + Delete + (1~25) * BatchWrite.
I'm curious what you mean by this. I would have said the exact opposite - AWS tends to keep projects around for a very long time. They haven't acquired very many open-source projects, but the few that they have are all still running as far as I know.
Well ...
Either way that news is awful. Europeans selling out to US corporations and then wondering why Europe is not competitive in software engineering anymore. Funniest thing is Draghi keeps on saying that; well, recently we also heard that the USA has full access to all national police databases in the EU now. It seems as if Washington remote-proxy-controls the EU. Quite amazing to see, too. The amount of bribe money flowing must be legendary.