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OCS 2020 Breakout: Ben Bromhead, Instaclustr

Ben Bromhead is Chief Technology Officer and co-founder at Instaclustr, setting the technical direction for the company. Ben is a distributed architecture expert with a demonstrated history of working in information security and highly available, distributed systems. Prior to Instaclustr, Ben had been working as an independent consultant developing NoSQL solutions for enterprises and he ran a high-tech cryptographic and cybersecurity formal testing laboratory at BAE Systems and Stratsec.

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OSS vs. Open Core: What needs to be vetted?

Introduction to presentation - 0:00

About Ben - 0:59

About Instaclustr.com. Providing modern database technologies as a service in the cloud, as well as support. - 1:32

A few disclaimers. Ben is not a lawyer. Talk is about trends, and every point has a counterpoint. Talk 99% applies to the database market. - 2:54

How Enterprises currently think about OSS - 4:55

Enterprise focus: finding the right tool for the right job - 6:20

How enterprises choose the right database/project - 7:13

The question enterprises are trying to answer - 9:56

How does an enterprise adopt this database/project? - 11:46

Visual: The Datafloq Open Source Landscape 2.0 - 12:54

How do enterprises assess their options? Generally, a company will end up adopting whatever is easiest. - 13:44

Should we think about this a little more? Yes! OSS projects are an amazing microcosm of competing incentives - 15:35

Looking at different business models, how incentives align, and what to watch out for. Comparing open source vendors. - 16:35

Open Core vendor based on Foundation Owned IP. Observations and financial incentives. Watch out for single vendors dominating project governance. - 16:50

Open Core vendor based on owned IP. Observations and financial incentives. Watch out for license risks. - 21:25

DIY with 3rd Party IP. Observations and financial incentives. Watch out for higher operational burden. Dangerous to go it alone. - 24:25

Hyperscale cloud offering (a.k.a. AWS/Google Cloud/Azure does it for me.) Observations and financial incentives. Watch out for vendor lock-in, especially in context around identity, access, authorization management, and switching costs. - 26:49

Independent Managed Service provider w/ Foundation owned IP. (Such as Instacluster, Aiven, some services from Datastax and Confluent.) Observations and financial incentives. Minimal lock-in means customer satisfaction is the only real mechanism, as incentives aligned purely to customer satisfaction. Consider these companies are building IP, but it’s focused on efficiency, not functionality, which doesn’t affect lock-in. - 30:15

”Core” takeaways. Choose right solution for technical requirements, including ongoing operational concerns, and always pay attention to vendor incentives. If there are a number of solutions that do the job well, then flexibility and a responsive vendor relationship should be highly prioritized. - 32:34


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