The issue that Elastic had is that their entire business model was offering a managed elasticsearch solution. Amazon then created their own offering of the same thing, but of course since it is Amazon it was more tightly coupled with AWS and benefited from being a native AWS solution. There was simply no way for Elastic to compete with that.
Now, there can be a lot of opinions on whether that is a good thing or a bad thing for the open source community, but it should be pretty obvious why elastic didn’t like it. They were a company who had a product they were selling, and then the biggest competitor in the world starts selling THE EXACT same thing with the EXACT same name. They needed to do something to compete.
So they did, and forced Amazon to change the name of their offering to opensearch instead of Elasticsearch. Once they achieved that, they reverted the change.
> since it is Amazon it was more tightly coupled with AWS and benefited from being a native AWS solution. There was simply no way for Elastic to compete with that.
That's one interpretation. I've another, which I've seen play out multiple times now across multiple OSS projects: company invents a thing, thinks that because they're the inventor of said thing they'll be able to sell a managed version of it, belatedly realise that inventing a piece of software doesn't magically make you the best in the world at running it at scale.
What Elastic, and most like them, can't compete with is the ability to run highly available/reliable software at the scale of Amazon.
>The issue that Elastic had is that their entire business model was offering a managed elasticsearch solution. Amazon then created their own offering of the same thing
Amazon first offered Elasticsearch as a managed service in 2015.
Elastic began offering managed services in 2018.
That’s not true. Elastic acquired Found in 2015 and immediately offered their managed Elasticsearch service. It was publicly announced at their user conference early that year.
Several years ago, I led a project at a startup to move from Postgres to Elasticsearch for geographic search. I chose Elasticsearch because it had the capability to do geohashing and so it provided a credible alternative to PostGIS for our particular use case. Geohashing-based search is particularly computationally intensive, which is somewhat different from traditional full-text search, which can be memory intensive.
I wanted to pay Elasticsearch to host our search cluster. And I did for a while. But it became clear we were paying for gobs of RAM that we weren't using and we didn't have enough CPU to really cover our search needs. I talked to the head of sales at the time and he said they were working on a plan that would allow us to choose machines that were more CPU heavy but that that was in the pipeline and there was no ETA.
So we switched to AWS and everything worked just fine.
All this is to say, Amazon was not offering the exact same service. They were offering a better service.
The issue that Elastic had is that their entire business model was offering a managed elasticsearch solution. Amazon then created their own offering of the same thing, but of course since it is Amazon it was more tightly coupled with AWS and benefited from being a native AWS solution. There was simply no way for Elastic to compete with that.
Now, there can be a lot of opinions on whether that is a good thing or a bad thing for the open source community, but it should be pretty obvious why elastic didn’t like it. They were a company who had a product they were selling, and then the biggest competitor in the world starts selling THE EXACT same thing with the EXACT same name. They needed to do something to compete.
So they did, and forced Amazon to change the name of their offering to opensearch instead of Elasticsearch. Once they achieved that, they reverted the change.