Don’t be a shill for big tech over elastic in this fight. AWS was using elastic’s trademark and aggressive advertising to push their managed elasticsearch. They left elastic with no economically logical choice. MongoDB and countless others also made similar choices.
AWS was super greedy and honestly I’m glad elastic even survived their aggressive tactics.
For the longest time, elastic didn't even have a cloud offering.
And by the time they did it was far far too late.
In the early days AWS elastic offering was very weak. It had lots of foot guns and operational problems. We tried hard to use an more native elastic offering and would have preferred it, but it didn't exist.
The fact AWS crappy hosted ES gained any market share is more a testament to how bad ES sales practices were than anything else.
ES really missed the mark by not having a simple, self-serve sales model and instead going all in convoluted "contact a sales rep" enterprise model no one wanted to deal with.
ES Enterprise Sales for an on-prem license might have been the worst sales experience I ever was part of as a customer. We were already a very technically self-sufficient org just wanting to get under a support contract. They made it so impossible to give them money we simply gave up and went with the open source fork during all the Amazon kerfuffle.
Dozen of hours of useless phone calls, and just nonsensical numbers coming out weeks or months later. Only to go back to the well and try again with a new team of reps after the first team inevitably churned out before any real progress was made.
I think it's more likely to cause a lost Decade of people not going into CS or tech due to lack of entry-level jobs. Maybe next time there's a boom and the pendulum of the power dynamic between management and labor swings more towards the workers, tech workers will unionize or organize better. I think overall it will benefit the industry because these boom and bust cycles for employment are just not healthy.
There is no guarantee that there will be a boom again. Some jobs disappear. Maybe we'll really only need a handful of elite engineers who continue advancing the foundational tools we use (kernels, databases, hyperscale low level cloud products, drivers, etc.) and the rest of "programmers" and "software engineers" will be replaced by "prompt engineers". With a new generation mostly unable to read and reason about source code.
There will always be some nerds left with brains so big they only scratch their itch if they are advancing performance critical v8 code in pure assembler. But the bar will rise for that to be something you get money for…
read the comments. The HN community is ecstatic. It's good to see there are a few who understand basic economics but politically, the folks here at hn are not much different than over at reddit lol
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