Not true, you can compete with the quality of the deployed service _separate_ from the development of the software. The quality of the service can include internal, at-scale optimizations that don't affect user-facing parity with the open-source software.
Open source companies with SaaS offerings need to have plans to differentiate themselves on hosting quality, not features. Yes, you can do better at hosting your own product than Amazon in many cases with customized, closed-source optimizations (that are unrelated to feature parity and does not intentionally limit the open-source/self-hosted form), support, etc.
Silly take due to how these resources must be distributed. Redis corp is paying developers to work on Redis itself, so they have less money to spend on building out a cloud offering. AWS was not paying developers to work on Redis, so they have more money to spend on improving their cloud offering (of Redis).
"Impossible to compete" is hyperbolic (you can almost always compete), but from a business fundamentals perspective it is not a level playing field and odds of success in that arena are very very low. And as my sibling comment points out, this is massively compounded by the fact that (by their very nature), hyperscalers are also hosting other infra for you, whereas Redis Cloud is only going to be offering hosted Redis. So even if the DX/UX is much better for Redis Cloud, it is still an uphill battle to convince corpos and even SMEs to split up their hosting like that.
> Not true, you can compete with the quality of the deployed service _separate_ from the development of the software.
That is true in a literal sense but (anecdotally) from the point of view of an engineer deploying ie; Redis, there is no real space for that angle of competition when the choice is between having to go through procurement hurdles to sign a contract with Redis Labs versus say; spinning up Redis on AWS which has zero hurdles because there is already an organization wide agreement in place for example.
The competition there isn't a level playing field as the deck is kind of stacked for most businesses where engineers don't have free reign to procurement what might be objectively the best hosting solution?
I've never really thought through this in any depth before now so don't consider this a great fleshed out argument, just an observation from my personal experience.
Honestly the idea that you can win by just being better is so deeply out of touch with enterprise that I assume anyone suggesting this doesn't understand the problem enough to be trying to argue against antirez of all people on Earth about this.
And that's not an appeal to authority: there just so genuinely and obviously is no such guarantee in enterprise that quality will ensure success that explaining it feels like trying to break down an elementary element.
Yeah, no. Customers will prefer to use redis in their existing AWS/Microsoft stack rather than use your deployed version in a different data center with a few micro optimizations.
They will pay Microsoft and Amazon, not you, the author of the software to use your software.
Open source companies with SaaS offerings need to have plans to differentiate themselves on hosting quality, not features. Yes, you can do better at hosting your own product than Amazon in many cases with customized, closed-source optimizations (that are unrelated to feature parity and does not intentionally limit the open-source/self-hosted form), support, etc.