2 years ago

Category: Business, Database, Kubernetes, github

Amazon Web Services (AWS) is now offering the wildly popular Grafana open source monitoring frontend as a commercial service, serving as another wait-and-see test case of what happens when AWS opts to build commercial services offerings around a popular open source product. These risks could conceivably include lost revenue for Grafana Labs if AWS’ Grafana services result in fewer users of Grafana’s service business offerings through its channel. Another potential risk for Grafana is if AWS were to fork Grafana and offer a similar observability platform that would compete directly with Grafana (and, in theory, with AWS Grafana as well). Previously, organizations could implement and run Grafana Enterprise and Grafana Cloud, the open source version of Grafana, Loki and Cortex, as well as Prometheus, on their AWS-hosted environments.

In what can be seen as a similar move, AWS courted controversy in the open source community in 2019 when it began to offer MongoDB as part of its cloud offerings and to offer commercial support services for MongoDB.