This basically kills Influxdb for me. We're evaluating influxdb in stand-alone mode to collect limited metrics (grafana) with a view to eventually moving more and more data to Influxdb once clustering became available. $399 per month is ridiculous. Clustering is table stakes.
Lesson learnt: before deploying a new OSS, check if they have a credible plan to support the project. Otherwise skip.
I mean, honestly, $400/mo is table stakes too, if you're actually using a clustered database in production for anything serious.
I think HN in general is being a bit too cynical here. This is an OSS company trying to find a sustainable way to survive. There are going to be some tricky tradeoffs. "They should just charge $20/mo for us small guys!" is not a reasonable course of action.
Regardless of whether this particular pricing plan works out or not, I think it's a good idea for programmers to support other programmers trying to make money on OSS. We are all not served very well by the general attitude of "I heard about this technology last year, it should be $0 now".
How much do you pay per month for:
Apache, Nginx, Varnish, Redis, memcached, compilers, interpreters, Nodejs, Cassandra, Linux, Postgresql?
We used to pay for this stuff - remember Sun? Things change.
I suspect what happened with InfluxData is that being venture funded, they see that the funding environment has changed and are racing towards revenue/cash-flow positive. And clustering as a premium feature is, apparently, the answer.
If clustering had been pegged as a premium feature up front then neither I, nor I suspect would anyone else, have a problem. But it wasn't, hence the sour taste.
Yea, but even free software maintainers need money from somewhere. Especially if you want $software to continue improving.
It's fantastic that free software has increased so much in market share. I just wish that more companies would recognize that that only works if they actually pay for development of some projects in some way. That can be directly employing maintainers, contributing patches, sponsoring feature development.
Since that often doesn't suffice you sometimes end up with companies trying to make ends mean with "open-core" type models; even if they'd otherwise prefer not to go down that road.
It has nothing to do about entitlement and everything to do with unethical business practices and poor quality in software engineering that many people remain numb to. Yes, InfluxDB is a business and everything they are doing is to appease venture capital, before this announcement and after. Starting as FOSS doesn't absolve you of a continuous failure to deliver. Others have entered the distributed space without the bullshit (FoundationDB is an example I like), so there's not much room for sympathy. InfluxDB can't even make a stable single node database and yet they pump their hype bubble with "next release gonna be webscale" just like the mongodb fiasco of years past. As software professionals, we should hold businesses to higher standards. This isn't a college kid's hobby project.
I doubt you're an actual InfluxDB user, but I'll bite. If thousands of people are using a free standalone server, is that a bad thing? If VCs subsidized the development of this free software, is that also a bad thing?
Software doesn't get written for free. That won't change. VCs can subsidize it for a while but eventually it has to be commercial.
It's also worth noting that FoundationDB was totally closed source and disappeared after the Apple acquisition.
That won't happen with InfluxDB. The open source standalone server code that we develop will continue to live on regardless of what happens with the company.
Nice rhetoric answer about not being a user but a trivial search will find my unresolved bug reports on tsm1. Open source doesn't give you moral high ground to develop poor quality software.
I'm not aware of unresolved bugs on TSM1. We have people running it at significant scale in production. You're on 0.10?
It's not rhetoric. I know people using it so it seems to me you're trying to spread FUD. There are still things we're working on, but we have many happy users that are operating at high scales.
I should also mention that almost all of them are doing this completely for free. Which is great. We want to subsidize our open source software
Yes 0.10. There are many manifestations of it, but https://github.com/influxdata/influxdb/issues/4121#issuecomm... is the most recent report. Telling people tsm1 is still broken is not FUD. I have no skin in the game other than wanting people to not have to waste time and end in frustration. In hindsight I would steer toward any other open source or paid product to have my time back investigating InfluxDB when I bought into the marketing thinking it could be made to work.
First, that bug is closed. Second, the last comment has nothing to do with TSM. Just because a user thinks it's related to the storage engine and posts that, doesn't mean that's what is actually happening.
For that particular user, it is something else they're hitting. Without more info we have no way of knowing why they're hitting that error.
Either I'm lying about people using this thing at significant scale or that user is having some other problem. Put simply, TSM is well tested and works. I'm certain other bugs will come up but the comment you linked has nothing to do with TSM.
I should also note that we have users running Telegraf on thousands of hosts sending metrics to a standalone InfluxDB server.
You're not lying, you're cherry picking cases that support your company's growth and ignoring the reality of bug volume on github and user reports of it not working well at moderate scale.
I have no stake whether you get it together or flop, so from this perspective I will cherry-pick bugs because that is what matters to users of a database which should be boring, stable, reliable, efficient.
With the change of direction on clustering, and I am skeptic of that being done well any time soon given the storage engine history, you have a hard road ahead of you. Until/unless you get it together, there are better choices, especially for pay, and the "everything is fine" message is infuriating.
Also, despite being mean here I do hope you get it together. I just wish you'd reconsider the marketing approach and hold claims of a production release back a long time until the bugs are under control.
Lesson learnt: before deploying a new OSS, check if they have a credible plan to support the project. Otherwise skip.