Quick, can you spot the common link between MongoDB, DataStax, Redis Labs, Percona, Couchbase, and EnterpriseDB? If you said, “They’re all open source database vendors,” you’d be mostly correct. (Not all offer databases governed by an open source license.)
But if you said, “Each offers an increasingly popular database-as-a-service cloud offering,” you’d be spot on. Indeed, while we’ve spent a few years with erstwhile open source vendors changing their licenses to ward off evil cloud vendors, what we’re starting to see is these same vendors embracing the cloud, and to hugely positive effect.
Hence, while Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi has correctly argued that “it’s extremely hard to manage and run a high quality managed service in the cloud and not all open source companies are good at it,” it’s also true that more companies are figuring this out, making the next decade the era of open source databases in the cloud.