Jerry Chen | Open Source vs. Cloud Castles

Hi, everyone. Welcome to Gray Matter, the podcast from GrayLock, where we share stories from company builders and business leaders. I'm Heather Mack, head of editorial at GrayLock. This episode is the audio version of a new SAP GrayLock General Partner, Jerry Chin. The essay is part of GrayLock's Castles in the Cloud series, which you can find at graylock.com slash Castles. Jerry continues his discussion on strategies startups can use to compete with the big three cloud providers. This time focusing on open source.

大家好，欢迎来到Gray Matter，这是GrayLock的播客节目，我们将分享公司创始人和企业领袖的故事。我是GrayLock的编辑主管Heather Mack。这一集是SAP GrayLock普通合伙人Jerry Chin的文章的音频版本。这篇文章是GrayLock的云堡垒系列的一部分，你可以在graylock.com/castles上找到。Jerry继续探讨初创企业可以使用的竞争大三云提供商的策略，这次集中在开源上。

Open source versus cloud castles. In my previous essay, explored strategies for how cloud startups can compete with the big three cloud providers, breaking up their dominance by avoiding them or going up the stack or building deep IP. There's another strategy that startups can consider when going up against big cloud open source.

开源与云堡的竞争。在我之前的文章中，探讨了云端初创公司如何与三大云计算服务提供商竞争的策略，通过避免或向上堆叠或构建深度知识产权来打破它们的主导地位。当初创企业面对大型云计算服务提供商时，还有另一种策略可以考虑，那就是与大规模开源竞争。

Former Microsoft CEO, Steve Balmer once called Linux a cancer, but Microsoft's $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub shows how far Microsoft and the entire industry of vendors and customers have come from cautiously using open source to embracing it. In the past 30 years, open source has matured from a risky and fringe business model to the de facto start of many new technologies. The cloud ecosystem is no different. While the big three may arguably be the greatest beneficiaries of open source, a growing group of open source startups are also proving to be among the income its most successful challengers.

微软前CEO史蒂夫·鲍尔默曾经称Linux为“癌症”，但微软花费75亿美元收购GitHub的举动表明微软以及整个供应商和客户行业从谨慎地使用开源，到现在已经完全接纳了它。在过去30年里，开源已经从一种高风险和边缘商业模式成长为许多新技术的事实标准。云生态系统也不例外。虽然争议不大的大三公司可能是受益最多的开源公司，但越来越多的开源初创公司也证明它们是可以成为最成功的挑战者之一。

These include a mix of public and private companies such as cockroach DB, chronosphere, confluent, data bricks, elastic, hashie corp, mango DB, mule soft, postman, redis labs and temporal, which have all achieved multi billion dollar valuations and recent years. The number of open source projects and companies have exploded in the past few years. I found a couple of online resources like the cloud native computing foundation market map and the OSS capital list of commercial open source companies useful to keep track of all the projects.

这些公司包括公共和私有公司，如CockroachDB、Chronosphere、Confluent、Databricks、Elastic、HashiCorp、MangoDB、MuleSoft、Postman、Redis Labs和Temporal等，这些公司最近几年都获得了数十亿美元的估值。最近几年，开放源码项目和公司数量急剧增加。我发现一些在线资源，如云原生计算基金会市场地图和OSS Capital的商业开放源码公司列表，有助于跟踪所有这些项目。

In previous computing errors, we watched startups employing open source to directly compete with the incumbents, examples, red hat used open source Linux to go against the Microsoft Windows monopoly, ZIN and KVM projects, competed against VMware and virtualization, and postgres and MySQL against Oracle and databases. Now we are seeing open source startups built in and for a cloud native ecosystem.

在过去的计算机错误中，我们注意到初创公司采用开源技术来直接与现有公司竞争，例如，Red Hat使用开源的Linux来对抗微软Windows垄断，ZIN和KVM项目与VMware和虚拟化竞争，postgres和MySQL与Oracle和数据库竞争。现在，我们看到开源初创公司在云原生生态系统中建立和发展。

Previously, older open source companies were mostly open source versions of existing on premise systems. As a result, these new startups are making a market impact far quicker than those from earlier generations because they're combining the low friction distribution of a cloud service with the open nature of open source communities to reach developers. Case in point, Kronosphere, which launched in 2019 and has been lending enough customers to see its ARR increase ninefold in the past year.

以前，早期的开源公司大多是现有本地系统的开源版本。因此，这些新的创业公司比早期的公司更快地在市场上产生了影响，因为它们将云服务的低摩擦分发与开放源代码社区的开放性相结合，以接触开发人员。比如Kronosphere，该公司于2019年推出，已为足够数量的客户提供服务，导致其年度收入增长了九倍。 （注：ARR即年度化重复收入）

The company was built on the open source observability platform M3, which founders Martin Mao and Rob Skillington developed at Uber. And Kronosphere has steadily expanded its products. To keep up with the demand, the company just raised $200 million at a $1 billion valuation and recently released a distributed tracing product. Kronosphere is part of a notable group of recent open source startups that have achieved success with a variety of approaches, namely leveraging an open source project that solved a hard problem for a cloud scale company. In this case, metrics at scale at Uber and then creating a cloud hosted offering for other companies to use.

这家公司的基础是开源可观察性平台M3，创始人马丁·毛和罗布·斯基林顿在Uber开发了这个平台。Kronosphere已经不断扩大了产品线。为了满足市场需求，该公司刚刚以10亿美元的估值筹集了2亿美元，并最近发布了一款分布式跟踪产品。Kronosphere是一群最近的开源创业公司中的一员，他们通过各种方法取得成功，即利用解决云规模公司的难题的开源项目。在这种情况下，是Uber的规模指标，然后创建一个云托管的产品以供其他公司使用。

The lines between open source companies and cloud companies leveraging open source are beginning to blur. While Kronosphere is an example of a company commercializing a popular open source project, many startups have built proprietary tech atop the open source offerings of the big three without having to become open source businesses themselves. For example, companies like InstaBase, Rockset, and Snowflake are not open source business models, but they have built interesting and technically hard products and data warehousing, real time analytics and document understanding respectively. Each of those companies leverage deep open source tech under the hoods like Rocks D, but have focused on region developers directly with a cloud service.

开源公司和利用开源的云计算公司之间的界限逐渐变得模糊起来。虽然 Kronosphere 是一个商业化流行开源项目的例子，但许多初创公司在大三的开源版本的基础上建立了专有技术，而无需成为开源企业本身。例如，像 InstaBase，Rockset 和 Snowflake 这样的公司不是开源业务模型，但它们分别在数据仓库、实时分析和文档理解方面构建了有趣且技术难度大的产品。这些公司每个人都利用了像 Rocks D 这样深层次的开源技术，但是专注于直接面向云服务的区域开发者。

Why is OSS on the rise? Open sources become the best way for new projects to start and generate collaborations by companies, universities, and individuals across the globe. You can find open source projects in every software category from JavaScript libraries, machine learning frameworks, and design tools.

为什么开源项目正兴起？开源已成为新项目启动和全球企业、大学和个人之间开展合作的最佳方式。您可以在每个软件类别中找到开源项目，包括JavaScript库、机器学习框架和设计工具。

The most popular open source projects are attracted for their distribution advantage. They reduce friction to awareness, trial, and adoption by customers. Plus, they often have cute animal logos. A popular project can solve the top of funnel concerns for startups and allow them to reach their customers directly to compete against the cloud vendors. If a startup's open source project can achieve the status of the de facto solution in a particular market and own the developer mind share, then the startup has a marketing advantage against the big cloud players. Finally, making the code free and easy to download or easy to launch on a cloud reaches the developer directly by passing the corporate procurement and other gates that can increase friction to adoption.

最受欢迎的开源项目吸引人们的原因在于它们具有分布优势。它们通过降低客户察觉、试用和采用的障碍来达到这一点。另外，它们通常还有可爱的动物标志。流行的项目可以解决初步问题，帮助初创企业直接与云供应商竞争，直接接触客户。如果一家初创企业的开源项目能够在特定市场上实现事实上的解决方案状态，并拥有开发者心智份额，那么该企业就具有了对抗大型云计算玩家的营销优势。最后，将代码免费并且易于下载或在云端轻松启动可以直接触达开发者，无需经过企业采购和其他可能增加采用难度的阻碍。

The strategy is spilling over into other technology industries. For example, RSCV is taking the open source business model to the semiconductor market to disrupt the ARM franchise. In fact, almost every application from a mobile app game to a database to your internet browser uses several open source libraries. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Azure, and most cloud vendors are all built on open source technology. Amazon's original web service, Elastic Compute Cloud, was built running open source Zen virtual machines. AWS has continued to leverage the mainstream adoption of open source by offering dozens of services, either built on open source or simply hosting open source projects. The latter is prompted a recent response from startups by changing open source licensing to prevent Amazon and other players from benefiting from the code created by the open source community. We'll dig into this licensing debate later.

这种策略已经蔓延至其他技术行业。例如，RSCV正在将开源业务模型引入半导体市场，以破坏ARM专利。事实上，从移动应用程序游戏到数据库再到互联网浏览器，几乎每个应用程序都使用多个开源库。Google、亚马逊、微软、Azure和大多数云供应商都是建立在开源技术的基础上。亚马逊的原始Web服务Elastic Compute Cloud是运行在开源Zen虚拟机上构建的。AWS通过提供数十个构建在开源上或仅托管开源项目的服务，继续利用主流采用开源技术的趋势。后者促使初创企业改变开源许可证以防止亚马逊和其他参与者从开源社区创建的代码中获益。我们将在稍后探讨这个许可证辩论。

I believe most infrastructure and other areas of computing can benefit from an open source project to help push research, development, and community. But that doesn't necessarily mean every area should have or need a commercial option from a startup or company. Some areas of technology like JavaScript frameworks are notoriously hard to monetize. GitHub is littered with thousands of open source projects that have no activity. Contrary to popularly believe the field of dream strategy of if you open source developers will come is far from guaranteed.

我相信大多数基础设施和其他计算领域都可以从一个开源项目中受益，以帮助推动研究、开发和社区。但这并不意味着每个领域都应该有或需要一个初创公司或企业的商业选择。像JavaScript框架这样的技术领域通常很难实现商业化。GitHub上有成千上万个没有活动的开源项目。与流行的想法相反，开源开发人员会自动来到的梦想战略远非保证。

What makes OSS work? For an open source project to potentially yield an interesting company, I believe the following elements are needed and even then it doesn't guarantee an outcome. Solving a hard problem. This is probably the most obvious factor. You need to be taking on something that requires solving. There are many ways to define what makes a problem hard. From issues like virtualization that may require deep operating systems knowledge to challenges and categories like data integration and messaging, which require interoperability. The list goes on. The commonality among these various problems is that they must be hard enough to not only guarantee there are a few substitutes, but also worthy enough that developers and customers will value it. If there are several substitute open source projects, then creating another company that's just one of in projects means that the project has to be the clear leader. In an ideal world, the company is one of one. In most cases, I believe that if you solve a hard problem to which there is a free open source alternative, customers will pay for the security and usage of a superior project. This is precisely why HasheeCorp has been such a successful company. It has several open source projects, including Vault, Terraform, Console, and others. Their business model is a combination of governance and security for these projects for on-premise use, as well as closed, hosted services for cloud-native customers.

什么使开源软件成功？我认为，要使一个开源项目具有潜在的商业价值，需要以下几个因素，但即使这些条件都满足，也不能保证项目一定会成功。 首先，解决一个难题是最基本的要求。这个难题可以从多个方面来定义。比如说，虚拟化可能需要深入的操作系统知识；数据集成和消息传递则需要互操作性等。这些难题的共同点是必须足够难以保证市场上不会出现太多同类替代品，同时也要具有足够的价值，以吸引开发者和用户对其产生兴趣。如果市场上已经存在了几种类似的开源项目，那么，为这个项目单独创建一家公司，意味着这个项目必须成为市场的领先者。在理想情况下，这个公司应该是唯一的领导者。通常情况下，我认为如果你解决了一个难题，虽然市场上有其他开源替代品，但只要你的项目更加安全和便于使用，顾客仍然会愿意为其支付费用。因此，HasheeCorp公司就非常成功了。他们的开源项目包括Vault、Terraform、Console等。公司的商业模式是将这些项目应用于本地环境，同时为云原生客户提供门户和安全服务。 （翻译由腾讯翻译君提供）

Making the product the business. Dev slash test is nice, but production is nicer. The technology should be used in the actual operations and runtime of your business, and hopefully powering your business critical applications. You can make money in Dev slash test, licensing, or other areas of software, but customers will pay more for production bits. Like I said, success is not guaranteed, and there have been unfortunate examples to the contrary, even with critical open source projects. For example, open SSL had no company and no supporters, and as a result was underfunded and under-supported. Additionally, some projects fall into a tragedy of the commons. They become so popular and widely used that everybody is happy to use a technology, but fewer willing to pay for a productized or even supported version.

将产品作为业务。开发/测试很好，但生产更好。技术应在您的业务的实际操作和运行中使用，并希望驱动您的关键业务应用程序。您可以通过开发/测试、许可证或其他软件领域赚钱，但客户将为生产版本付更多款项。就像我说的那样，成功并不保证，甚至连关键的开源项目也有不幸的例子。例如，Open SSL 没有公司和支持者，结果资金不足、支持不足。此外，有些项目陷入了“公共悲剧”。它们变得如此受欢迎和广泛使用，以至于每个人都乐意使用一种技术，但更少的人愿意为其打包或甚至支持版本付款。

Having community-led growth. The vibrancy of the community around an open source project is how you know you are solving a hard problem, and also typically an indicator that there are a few substitute projects. It also allows you to address several critical factors at once, including problem awareness, does the customer know the problem exists and is a priority? Solution awareness. Does the user know that a solution or open source project exists? Company awareness. Does the community know and recognize that a company is providing a product or offering support? And finally, community-led growth, which reduces friction to trial, adoption, and usage of the project, either as an enterprise product, or more frequently today as a hosted cloud service.

拥有社区领导的增长。开源项目周围的社区活力是您解决难题的证明，通常也是一些替代项目的指示器。它还可以让您同时解决几个关键因素，包括问题意识，客户是否知道问题的存在并且是优先考虑的？解决方案意识。用户是否知道存在解决方案或开源项目？公司意识。社区是否知道并认可公司提供的产品或提供支持？最后是社区领导的增长，它降低了项目试用、采用和使用的摩擦，无论是作为企业产品还是更频繁地作为托管云服务。

The more people using a project, the easier it is to attract contributors, making the project better, which in turn attracts more customers. The first to do that is most likely to create a flywheel from these network effects. The owner and audience winner isn't necessarily always the one offering the best technology at first, but often the one with the most vibrant and dedicated developer community, which improves the product over time, and turns it into a winner. MongoDB is another good example of being unique as a document DB. Elastic wasn't the first to only search indexing technology, but it stood on the shoulders of previous projects, like Lucen, to become the community winner.

项目使用者越多，就越容易吸引贡献者，使项目变得更好，从而吸引更多的客户。第一个做到这一点的人最有可能从这些网络效应中创造出一个良性循环。成功的所有者和受众并不一定总是最初提供最好技术的人，而往往是拥有最充满活力和专注的开发者社区的人，这可以随着时间的推移改进产品并将其变成赢家。MongoDB是另一个好的例子，作为一种文档数据库它很独特。Elastic并不是第一个只有搜索索引技术的公司，但它站在以前的项目（如Lucene）的肩膀上，成为了社区的赢家。

Getting the timing right. Open source projects have network effects. Being first to market as the first open source project isn't always guaranteed to be a winning strategy, but the first project to gain critical massive developers and community interest is typically the winner. Likewise, being first to a cloud service isn't a guarantee to beat the big cloud vendors, but it helps. Mongo Atlas and Elastic's cloud services were released ahead of Amazon's document DB and Amazon's Elastic, which probably made all the difference in the world. MongoDB has been aggressively moving its business to the cloud over the past few years, and in Q1 of 2021, more than half of its revenue came from the cloud Atlas business. Other data companies are trying to make this transition to cloud. For example, Confluent, the company behind popular open source project Kafka, published in its S1 that only 18% of its revenue is in the cloud.

时机把握得当。开源项目具有网络效应。成为第一个开源项目并不总是赢得战略的保证，但是第一个获得关键的大量开发者和社区兴趣的项目通常会成为胜利者。同样地，成为云服务的第一个并不能保证打败大型云供应商，但这很有帮助。Mongo Atlas和Elastic的云服务是在亚马逊的文档DB和Amazon Elastic之前发布的，这可能是举足轻重的。MongoDB在过去几年中一直在积极地将其业务转移到云端，在2021年第一季度，其收入的一半以上来自于云端Atlas业务。其他数据公司正在尝试转向云端。例如，流行的开源项目Kafka背后的公司Confluent在其S1中发布，其只有18%的收入来自云端。

Evolving with tech transitions. In the past, open source companies started with a commercial core on-premise product and then created a cloud hosted solution to complement the private cloud offering. As the cloud is evolved, and cloud native is the default starting point for developers, startups are skipping the on-premise business model altogether to build for the cloud. This strategy not only has the advantage of timing as discussed above, but also allows the startup to architect the technology for a cloud native environment, free from the compromises needed for hybrid offerings. There are plenty of examples of companies that bypass the on-premise to cloud transition and went straight to cloud only.

随着科技转型的不断发展。过去，开源公司以商业核心的专有产品为基础，然后开发云托管解决方案来补充私有云提供的服务。随着云技术的发展，云原生成为开发人员的默认起点，初创公司完全跳过云原生业务模型，直接构建云端产品。这种策略不仅具有时间优势，正如上面所讨论的那样，还允许初创公司为云本地环境架构技术，从而摆脱混合提供方案所需的妥协。有很多公司绕过现场转云的过渡，直接走向纯云端服务的转型例子。

Databricks, which commercialized the open source Spark project, started entirely on the cloud and shunned on-premise customers originally after seeing how Amazon's elastic map reduced was an effective defense against cloud era, which was slow to move to the cloud.

Databricks 是将开源的 Spark 项目商品化的公司。该公司最初完全基于云端，并在看到亚马逊的弹性 MapReduce 成为云时代有效的防御措施后，不愿意接待现场的客户。这是因为现场的客户很难转移到云端。

Remembering that licensing is not a mode. While licensing does help with timing strategy, I don't think it's enough to build a mode against big cloud. Recently, more companies have been changing and using restrictive licensing to prevent cloud vendors from taking the open source project and running on their clouds. Mongo was one of the first when it started using the AGPL license, but companies like Confluent and Elastic have all released a version of an open source license that makes it difficult for Google, Amazon, or Azure to run their software in the cloud without cost or penalty. If a company can slow a cloud vendor or competitor for embracing your project, that gives the startup a timing advantage. However, these licenses will not stop in Amazon, for example, and building a compatible service like DocumentDB is to Mongo, or even potentially forking a project like they did to Elastic.

请记住，许可证不是一种模式。尽管许可证有助于时机策略，但我不认为仅凭它就足以抵御大型云平台。近年来，越来越多的公司正在改变并使用限制性许可证，以防止云平台提供商使用开源项目。Mongo是最早采用AGPL许可证的公司之一，但像Confluent和Elastic这样的公司也发布了开源许可证版本，使谷歌、亚马逊或Azure在云端运行其软件变得困难或需要花费和处罚。如果一家公司能够减缓云平台提供商或竞争对手采用你的项目，那么这将为创业公司提供时间上的优势。然而，这些许可证并不能阻止亚马逊等公司建立兼容的服务，类似于DocumentDB对Mongo的作用，或者甚至像他们对Elastic所做的分支。

Conclusion At the core, the tenants of successful open source practices hold true for any strategy you undertake. Solving a hard problem that people are aware of, providing a solution that people agree is helpful, establishing your company as the problem solver, making usage an adoption of your product easy, and of course, crafting a successful good opportunity to work with them. However, after a successful go-to-market strategy that is scalable. However, bear in mind that while open source is a popular, logical, and often successful strategy for many reasons, adapting it to the cloud-only era comes with an extra set of challenges.

结论 从本质上讲，成功的开源实践的原则可以适用于您所采取的任何策略。解决人们意识到的难题，提供人们认为有帮助的解决方案，将您的公司确立为解决问题的专家，使产品易于使用和普及，当然，还需要制定一个成功的市场推广策略，并且具有可扩展性。然而，请记住，尽管开源出于许多原因是一种受欢迎、逻辑和常常成功的策略，但将其适应于云计算时代还需要额外的挑战。

Startups using open source strategies during the cloud transition era, provided critical products and services, which allowed them to compete with the big three.

在云转型时代，采用开源策略的创业公司提供了关键的产品和服务，使他们能够与三大巨头竞争。

But the same tactics may not necessarily have the same impact in the cloud-only era. Unless, Challenger startups must carefully consider their entry point and develop a product and business model adapted to the current evolving cloud ecosystem.

但是，在纯云时代，相同的策略不一定会产生相同的影响。除非挑战者初创企业必须仔细考虑他们的进入点，并开发适应当前不断发展的云生态系统的产品和商业模式。

That concludes this episode of Grey Matter. If you want to hear more from the Castles in the Cloud series, please check out our website at greylock.com slash castles.

这就是本期《灰色物质》的全部内容。如果你想要了解更多《云中城堡》系列的信息，请访问我们的网站greylock.com/castles。

To hear more of our podcasts on all subjects, please subscribe to SoundCloud, Spotify, or ever get your podcasts. You can find more content at greylock.com slash blog, and you can follow us on Twitter at greylockvc.

想要听更多关于各个主题的播客，请订阅SoundCloud、Spotify或获取您的播客。您可以在greylock.com/blog找到更多内容，也可以在Twitter上关注我们的greylockvc账号。

I'm Heather Mack, and thanks for listening.

我是海瑟·麦克，感谢您的倾听。