SAAS IS THE ENEMY OF OPEN SOURCE GOOD THING THAT WE ARE IN THE POST-SAAS ERA

Presented by

Ori Pekelman | Co-Founder & VP of Marketing | [email protected] | https://platform.sh

SAAS IS THE ENEMY OF OPEN SOURCE GOOD THING THAT WE ARE IN THE POST-SAAS ERA

mailto:[email protected]

ÉDITION 2016 | 16&17 NOVEMBRE

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SAAS IS THE ENEMY OF OPEN SOURCE GOOD THING THAT WE ARE IN THE POST-SAAS ERA

Horizon 2020's SME Instrument laureateConcours d’Innovation Numérique laureate

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Self-Hosted Open SourceGoogle owns your soul and first born

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Software has eaten the world and the web has eaten software; The last ten years were the SaaS era.

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➔ But hidden. Running in the background.➔ Not the software end-users use. ➔ Without the promise of liberty. ➔ It killed proprietary software, but left us, both

individuals and companies no better for it.

In the meantime Open Source won.

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Standardisation won over NIH, commoditization won over the snowflake industry.

Why is SaaS winning?

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Economy of scale simply made it less and less rational to invest in in-house custom built software that is subpar.

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And from SMEs to the large enterprise, often reluctantly, IT was forced to let go of bespoke development of heavy to install and maintain on-premise solution and replace those by “best of breed solutions” from SaaS providers.

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● Transforming Capex to Opex● While reducing operating costs● With improved Time To Market● … and much superior user-experience. Consumer technology basically won over the enterprise one.

Because SaaS brought the promise of

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Putting stuff, out-there, on the web, made integrating silos ever simpler.

It was, and it is a rational choice.

Conjugated with a world of simpler APIs

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Who in their right mind would choose Outlook over gmail?

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The horror of it was the loss of our privacy.

For us, individuals

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● A total lack of control of the roadmap● Inability to innovate beyond what everybody else has● Lack of control of your data● Vendor lock-in● And once that one sank in, rising costs

For the enterprise, slowly, you discovered you suffered from

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If you are in industry that has not yet “been disrupted”, and you are not the “disruptor”, your company’s future is at highest risk.

And mind you, there will be no non-digital enterprises.

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What the hmpfff are you talking about?

97% of software we run is proprietary on-premise…. mixed with legacy bespoke …

If you have not yet seen the tidal wave of SaaS attack your shores. It’s coming. And it will take 20 more years to bury the old Microsoft. It’s still dead. Remember … Open-Source won.

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And this is orthogonal to the cloud issue.The question is Bespoke vs Universally shared.The universally shared model, SaaS, is always proprietary.

Not about Web Vs Legacy.

A quick story. We are using a well known SaaS product. A A couple of days ago they said “hey you are using 180% of the allowed space. 1.8GB, we will shut down your business critical system if you don’t upgrade”

I downloaded the whole dataset. 60MB compressed. 800MB. I could buy more space for 135$ / 500MB / Month.

This is VS 0.03$ to buy and 1.5$/M to rent from AWS.

So sometimes using SaaS means, if they can, they would make you pay the price of 20 years ago.

I mean 1996 GB.

WTF.

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The pendulum has swung so far to the services side that companies, without even knowing it, become subservient, on the long-run they would discover that they are now vassals.

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● The SaaS model has not even showed all of it’s muscles. ● Because machine learning techniques are still in their

infancy.● A solution that has not only scale in operations and

development costs but also in understanding will become harder and harder to beat.

Because it’s not even about the code.It is about DATA.

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But Open Source won, didn’t it?

● Most of the code running SaaS solutions (like anything else) uses Open Source.

● Much of it GPL. ● But the end result has even worse effects than running

proprietary on-premise.

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Infrastructure level Open Source has no problem

● Google, Microsoft and IBM are more than happy to contribute

● There are of course examples (shout-out to Gitlab), but these are rare.

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It’s the end-user Open Source projects that suffer

● These are the ones that matter to our liberty and privacy.

● And it is very hard to monetize.

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Why monetize? It’s all about the freedom, chill.

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It’s 2016, we are no longer having this conversation.

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It’s 2016, we are no longer having this conversation. Food.

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Believe me, monetizing GPL, I know.

● At the foundation of Commerce Guys, an Open Source Vendor, started around 2009.

● Drupal Commerce is fundamentally better than the other e-commerce solutions out there.

● As first order of business we were going to beat Magento.● Hugely successful (60,000 running sites. Big ones too).● Big community, many contributions● Even raised VC money.

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Monetization Strategies

● Support● Marketplace● Professional services● Hosted / SaaS version

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● Support - we didn’t make a broken product.● Marketplace - took more than three years● Professional services - worked. But that’s not scalable.● Hosted / SaaS version - Shebang.

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● Support● Marketplace● Professional services● Hosted / SaaS version - Shebang.

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Go SaaS!

● The problem was that a SaaS model just didn’t cut it. ● We could dumb down the solution to make it one shoe

fits all.● But then.. it wouldn’t be any better. It was better

because it was open, a framework, easy to extend and hack.

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When SaaS won...

● There were economics reasons, but there were also technical reasons for the world to have went SaaS

● Maintaining numerous large software projects was simply not feasible with the technics of 10 years ago.

● Now with Git, Containers, Orchestration and lifecycle automation technologies, we can suddenly benefit from the best of both worlds.

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We knew that now it is possible to make

● A software platform that evolves continuously and that is cheap to maintain and manage at scale (with true SLAs, scalability and all).

● On top of which you can do have your own innovative edge with custom code

● The 95% of the code that is shared can be managed as cheaply as a single monolithic SaaS solution.

● Git! Containers! Orchestration! Cloud!

Zero admin chores: The most extreme version of DevOps, is NoOps

Git-driven infrastructureWith a single git push you can deploy an arbitrarily complex cluster (with micro-services, messages queues and the lot.)

Automated high-availability of everythingEverything is managed & automated: from the network to the filesystem, from the build process to deployment.

Multi-cloud, multi-app, multi-stackWith Sovereign Hosting as a featureDeploy any PHP, Node.js, Python or Ruby application.

BEYOND CLOUD HOSTING

Clone a byte-for-byte copy of your production site in less than a minute.

➔ Every git branch has a url

➔ Eliminates QA bottlenecks

➔ 90% faster human testing and validation

➔ Fail proof, predictable deployments

➔ Quick bug fixes and security release resolution

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This worked.

● It was hard work. Expensive work. Getting a 24/7/365 highly available operation with support and billing infrastructure is not cheap.

● But we discovered that the problem we were trying to solve for our own Open Source solution, Drupal Commerce, was general.

● Our clients, asked us for what goddamn reason they couldn’t use this for other Open Source projects.

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… so Drupal Commerce is doing just fine

● A smaller company that focuses on the core product● With a marketplace that works● With many contributors● Also selling expertise● But we had to spin-off and sell that in order to go for the more

general solution

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We didn’t beat our good open source friends from Magento

● We joined forces. Now Magento Cloud runs on a white-label Platform.Sh

● And eZ Platform● And Typo 3● And many small ones. Like Open Social from Goal Gorilla (shout-out!)● Stay tuned for more in a couple of weeks. And then some more.

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Simple projects, with important outcomes

● This allows Open Source vendors to compete with SaaS providers, on the same terms

● Longest integration took 2 months. Quickest 2 weeks.● Most OS vendors could not efford this. Or the solution they would

valiantly create will be subpar, and not scale.● This is not only a boon for the vendors. Also for the myriad of open

source developers in these communities. Because it’s industrialized.

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The web won, and open source can still win the important battle.

● But only if there is an operational model in which bespoke can function at scale.

● It’s only when it is compatible with the world of APIs and Cloudy Clouds.

● Only where even smaller Open Source vendors can monetize, at scale, as a service.

● We still need to solve the Machine Learning thing though. Ideas?

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In the Post SaaS Era

● We can have sustainable Open Source projects● We can benefit from the shared while keeping control● Control means innovation● And Control means privacy

@platformsh

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SAAS IS THE ENEMY OF OPEN SOURCE GOOD THING THAT WE ARE IN THE POST-SAAS ERA