People will find increasingly clever ways to work around the lack of clustering, as they always did. This could mean only the top-tier users will be paying, which must be a very small portion of the pie.
Even though this announcement is sold as something that will empower InfluxData to add even more cool features to the open source version, I'm actually worried that it won't be around as an open source product for very long. Let me explain.
InfluxDB is a very fine product but I don't think it has all the momentum it needs to keep going in the long term yet. That means it's still building that critical mass of supporters in an open source ecosystem. With this announcement, InfluxData is eroding the trust that small to medium-sized users had in it so the momentum slows down. If InfluxDB was a no-brainer for anyone starting a time-series project, it is not anymore. All the other alternatives need to be carefully analyzed and, even if InfluxDB is chosen, there is that voice in the back of your head saying you'll be in trouble if you exceed a single node's capacity. Eventually people will jump to the next TSDB solution that offers clustering as soon as it becomes avaiable. Then where are all those paying customers going? It'll then be easier and cheaper for InfluxDB to become a proprietary software company.
While there are some comparisons being made to what Nginx does with its Nginx Plus offering, I think it's the opposite situation. IIRC, since the early days, Nginx has offered a paid product with more features. And recently they have started to add those features to the open source version, so people got happier. InfluxDB has always promised clustering (it was a major selling point, go watch any presentation about it from 2 years ago), shipped the code (even if it's half-working as of now) and now announced it's removing the functionality. Suddenly any InfluxDB node you have (even if it's running just fine without clustering) looks like a lemon.
It's all such bad PR. And it's 2016, haven't hundreds of OSS companies been through this already? Oh well.
Even though this announcement is sold as something that will empower InfluxData to add even more cool features to the open source version, I'm actually worried that it won't be around as an open source product for very long. Let me explain.
InfluxDB is a very fine product but I don't think it has all the momentum it needs to keep going in the long term yet. That means it's still building that critical mass of supporters in an open source ecosystem. With this announcement, InfluxData is eroding the trust that small to medium-sized users had in it so the momentum slows down. If InfluxDB was a no-brainer for anyone starting a time-series project, it is not anymore. All the other alternatives need to be carefully analyzed and, even if InfluxDB is chosen, there is that voice in the back of your head saying you'll be in trouble if you exceed a single node's capacity. Eventually people will jump to the next TSDB solution that offers clustering as soon as it becomes avaiable. Then where are all those paying customers going? It'll then be easier and cheaper for InfluxDB to become a proprietary software company.
While there are some comparisons being made to what Nginx does with its Nginx Plus offering, I think it's the opposite situation. IIRC, since the early days, Nginx has offered a paid product with more features. And recently they have started to add those features to the open source version, so people got happier. InfluxDB has always promised clustering (it was a major selling point, go watch any presentation about it from 2 years ago), shipped the code (even if it's half-working as of now) and now announced it's removing the functionality. Suddenly any InfluxDB node you have (even if it's running just fine without clustering) looks like a lemon.
It's all such bad PR. And it's 2016, haven't hundreds of OSS companies been through this already? Oh well.