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MariaDB CEO Accuses Large Cloud Vendors of Strip-Mining Open Source (zdnet.com)
Big cloud companies are "strip-mining open-source technologies and companies," complains Michael Howard, CEO of MariaDB. At their developer conference, Howard accused "big cloud" of "really abusing the license and privilege [of open source], by not giving back to the community." ZDNet reports:
Even as MariaDB grows by leaps and bounds in enterprise computing at Oracle's expense, Howard sees Oracle and Amazon fighting against it. "Oracle as the example of on-premise lock-in and Amazon being the example of cloud lock-in. You could interchange the names, you can honestly say now that Amazon should just be called Oracle Prime...."
In the first keynote, Austin Rutherford, MariaDB's VP of Customer Success, showed the result of a HammerDB benchmark on AWS EC2... In these tests, AWS's default MariaDB instances did poorly, while AWS homebrew Aurora, which is built on top of MySQL, consistently beat them. The top-performing database management system of all was MariaDB Managed Services on AWS. "My first reaction when I looked at the benchmarks," said Howard, was "maybe there's incompetence going on. Maybe they just don't know how to optimize a DBMS." He observed that one MariaDB customer, one of the biggest retail drug companies in the world, had told MariaDB that "Amazon offers the most vanilla MariaDB around. There's nothing enterprise about it. We could just install MariaDB from source on EC2 and do as well."
He then "began to wonder, Is there something that they're deliberately crippling?" Howard wouldn't go so far as to say AWS is consciously doing a poor job of implementing its MariaDB instances. Howard did say, "And then it became clear that, however, you want to articulate this, there is something not kosher happening." Howard doesn't have much against AWS promoting its own brands... But, if AWS's going out of its way to make a rival service look inferior to its own, well, Howard's not happy about that.
ZDNet adds that "it's also quite possible that unoptimized generic MariaDB instance will simply lag behind AWS-optimized Aurora.
"That said, even in this most innocent take on the benchmark results, cloud customers would be wise to take into consideration that cloud instances of any specific software service may not be created equal."
In the first keynote, Austin Rutherford, MariaDB's VP of Customer Success, showed the result of a HammerDB benchmark on AWS EC2... In these tests, AWS's default MariaDB instances did poorly, while AWS homebrew Aurora, which is built on top of MySQL, consistently beat them. The top-performing database management system of all was MariaDB Managed Services on AWS. "My first reaction when I looked at the benchmarks," said Howard, was "maybe there's incompetence going on. Maybe they just don't know how to optimize a DBMS." He observed that one MariaDB customer, one of the biggest retail drug companies in the world, had told MariaDB that "Amazon offers the most vanilla MariaDB around. There's nothing enterprise about it. We could just install MariaDB from source on EC2 and do as well."
He then "began to wonder, Is there something that they're deliberately crippling?" Howard wouldn't go so far as to say AWS is consciously doing a poor job of implementing its MariaDB instances. Howard did say, "And then it became clear that, however, you want to articulate this, there is something not kosher happening." Howard doesn't have much against AWS promoting its own brands... But, if AWS's going out of its way to make a rival service look inferior to its own, well, Howard's not happy about that.
ZDNet adds that "it's also quite possible that unoptimized generic MariaDB instance will simply lag behind AWS-optimized Aurora.
"That said, even in this most innocent take on the benchmark results, cloud customers would be wise to take into consideration that cloud instances of any specific software service may not be created equal."
I've consistently seen Aurora MySQL performance worse than RDS MySQL on writes, and overall, a carefully tuned (in a way you can't tune RDS or Aurora due to lack of access) MariaDB instance on EC2 will utterly annihilate Aurora and RDS on overall performance, for same instance sizes. Of course, a bare metal setup of the same size (same CPU cores, same RAM amount) will annihilate the EC2 instance on performance and at about half of the TCO over three years, but nobody seems to care about that these days.
Amazon basically offers 3 or 4 versions of the same car going from "you rent and maintain it yourself" to "you rent and we maintain and provide a driver for you". However it seems that if you bring your own mechanic and driver, no matter how skillful they are, their drivers and mechanics get consistently and measurably better performance out of the same car depending on the amount of money you pay to them even though they're all supposedly the same cars with the same specs.
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These guys keep saying "open" and then they keep complaining about what others do with the source. Open means you don't get to control what other people do.
They aren't following the spirit of the GPL. They are being anti-social: taking from the labors of others, and not contributing back.
There is no law against being anti-social, so they are free to do it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
Bascially, all your "customers" are required to do is share the source if they share binaries (in the case of the GPL 2.0) or not remove the license information (in the case of BSD-like licenses). If you can't live with that, don't publish under those licenses.
The problem is that places like Amazon *ARE* "sharing the binary" as a service but then not sharing the modified source. The GPL was written when the primary way of sharing software was via binaries not services.
It is the easy choice for management, because "everybody uses AWS".
I've had to constantly defend my decision to use IBM Cloud as backend for an educational app. Because "everybody else" uses AWS. And this is in a primarily academic setting and background (spinoff from a project originally developed at a major U.S. university). We faced some issues with learning curve and the fact that you can't easily find consultants with IBM Cloud experience, and the "everybody" argument came up. It was eventually resolved, we got over the learning curve, and IBM has great support if you are willing to pony-up a modest $200/month for support.
It boggles my mind that so many small/medium/large businesses in retail, wholesale, transportation, distribution, etc. are trusting their data and IT to and funding a company that is out to put them out of business. AWS is the ONLY real money-maker at Amazon. Their online retail operation is FINALLY making a 2% profit!
IBM Cloud and Microsoft Azure are the RATIONAL choices right now if you want to use "big cloud" for critical infrastructure. We did not go with Azure because we do not have a Windows-based infrastructure, not into ASP, etc. etc. Though I realize that Azure has more Linux servers than Windows and offers the same open-source Linux-based solutions as the other cloud services. I think Azure would be a FINE choice for any company that is already bought-in to the Microsoft infrastructure, as they offer many unique services that would allow companies with in-house Windows-based server to move some or all to the cloud.
Neither IBM nor Microsoft is interested in putting your retail business out of business.
Amazon's RDS offerings are really convenient, from the perspective of making snapshots and setting up replication. But, I have never been able to push their default 'SSD' storage past 60MB/s. (PostgreSQL and Mysql) That's terrible. That's less than USB 2, and even some SD cards can do that! Our on-prem can do 180MB/s on spinning rust and around 550MB/s on (obsolete) SATA SSD. If you want anything better on RDS you have to REALLY pay a premium for IOPs and transfer, or pay a premium for way more ram and a ton of caching, in addition to external caching in the rest of your stack. I have not used Aurora on RDS, so I don't have a comparison, but I have my suspicions. It would be pretty easy to just give you a few more MB/s and make it look a whole lot better. Luckily in our case we could optimize things enough that storage performance didn't matter too much. But RDS storage performance is so pitiful that it's seriously worth considering putting your DB on a bare metal box somewhere with NVME storage and just put up with the network latency and get 50 times the storage performance (and more ram and cpu while you're at it ) at a fraction of the price.