Co-founder of Quickwit here. Seeing our acquisition by Datadog on the HN front page feels like a truly full-circle moment.
HN has been interwoven with Quickwit's journey from the very beginning. Looking back, it's striking to see how our progress is literally chronicled in our HN front-page posts:
- Searching the web for under $1000/month [0]
- A Rust optimization story [1]
- Decentralized cluster membership in Rust [2]
- Filtering a vector with SIMD instructions (AVX-2 and AVX-512) [3]
- Efficient indexing with Quickwit Rust actor framework [4]
- A compressed indexable bitset [5]
- Show HN: Quickwit – OSS Alternative to Elasticsearch, Splunk, Datadog [6]
- Quickwit 0.8: Indexing and Search at Petabyte Scale [7]
- Binance built a 100PB log service with Quickwit [9]
- Datadog acquires Quickwit [10]
Each of these front-page appearances was a milestone for us. We put our hearts into writing those engineering articles, hoping to contribute something valuable to our community.
I'm convinced HN played a key role in Quickwit's success by providing visibility, positive feedback, critical comments, and leads that contacted us directly after a front-page post. This community's authenticity and passion for technology are unparalleled. And we're incredibly grateful for this.
Anyway tantivy is great! I love pg_search https://www.paradedb.com/blog/introducing_search (which appears to be built by another company, but on top of tantivy, which is a great feature of open source)
Now, I am worried about development being stalled after this acquisition. How does further developing tantivy in the open helps Datadog's bottom line?
I joined Datadog after the Vector acquisition and now currently am the manager for the Community Open Source Engineering team that works on Vector open source.
It’s def. not deprecated, but it did take awhile to sort out. It’s not easy figuring out business vs giving away software for free.
Anyways, there’s quite a few issues and GitHub discussions everyday, in addition to Discord chats.
I'm using Vector for my own infrastructure and at work, at the time it seemed the best option to ship logs to various destinations. Are there any alternatives?
Re: Tantivy. I'm hopeful the community Paul and the Quickwit team have built on top of Tantivy will continue to flourish. I'm sure Datadog will build product(s) with Quickwit, which is built on Tantivy and will contribute to it. Many other companies like ours (ParadeDB) and other databases also integrate it. I can't speak for others, but we'll contribute whenever possible. We're currently working on supporting nested documents in Tantivy, for example, and hoping to upstream this work.
While it's reasonable to be concerned, I'd say this is a win for Quickwit, Tantivy and, of course, the well-deserving team behind them.
Congratulations! The fact you and your team managed to built Tantivy is a huge contribution to open source.
As someone who never managed to built a fond relationship with Apache Lucene based products (Solf, Elastic). I was extremely happy to see Tantivy in open source.
BM25 scoring, proper asian language support, speed, memory foot prints, etc - amazing job! Thank you so much!
If Tantivy itself just stays permanently under Apache2 licence and find a sustainable path to co exist with the rest of open source community - it's all good guys. You are more than deserve a commercial success.
Well, it looks like Quickwit was going to add an Enterprise license as of earlier this year (PR #5529), which I had been keeping eyes on, but this announcement says they're instead going to relicense as Apache 2.0 so the "community can continue on":
> We will be focused on building a new product with Datadog, and to ensure our open-source community can continue, we will soon release a major update of both Quickwit with a relicense to Apache License 2.0 and tantivy.
So, it looks like we'll get a more liberally licensed Quickwit, but reading between the lines suggests development of it is might otherwise be winding down? It has been pretty nice and stable in my experience, so I can't really complain much. But I was really looking forward to what else it could bring.
"So, it looks like we'll get a more liberally licensed Quickwit, but reading between the lines suggests development of it is might otherwise be winding down?"
They will stop fulltime day-to-day effort in it themselves, probably because they have been relocated to writing a similar service but closed and integrated in DD, but it seems they want to opensource the current product with a OSI compliant license in the hopes that the community picks up the tab.
I think that's a nice trade. Could have been much worse.
By the way, also note that DD is not a total stranger in the OSS space. They actually opensourced their observability pipeline tooling for general use as Vector, which is a rock solid product. - https://vector.dev/
Yes, I've been using Vector since very early on, long before Datadog acquired it, and Datadog have continued ongoing maintenance and feature additions at a slow-but-steady pace, which I think is good. Like Quickwit, Vector is very stable and already quite complete. So I'm not too unhappy.
But Vector is something that complements Datadog's offering very well, so I think that makes sense for them to be good stewards of it. Quickwit is something that somewhat actively competes against them, which is a big difference. I suspect that unlike Vector, Quickwit is probably going to stop seeing any development in pretty short order, unless the devs now can consciously go out of their way to dedicate extra hours to it.
To be clear, I think that the relicense is great, and I think it's very possible that Quickwit will be picked up/forked by someone and maintenance will continue, because it's very good, and I'd really love to see someone do metrics for it as well. So, I'm not all gloomy or anything like that.
OrioleDB continues to be a fully open source and liberally licensed. We're working with the OrioleDB team to provide an initial distribution channel so they can focus on the storage engine vs hosting + providing lots of user feedback/bug reports. Our shared goal is to advance OrioleDB until it becomes the go-to storage engine for Postgres, both on Supabase and everywhere else.
I don't want to hijack Datadogs+Quickwit's post comment section with unrelated promotional-looking info. Quick summary below but if you have any other questions pls tag olirice in a Supabase GH discussion.
The OrioleDB storage engine for postgres is a drop-in replacement for the default heap method. Its takes advantage of modern hardware (e.g. SSDs) and cloud infrastructure. The most basic benefit is that throughput at scale is > 5x higher than heap [1], but it also is architected for a bunch of other cool stuff [2]. copy-on-write unblocks branching. row-level-WAL enables an S3 backend and scale-to-zero compute. The combination of those two makes it a suitable target for multi-master.
So yes, given that it could greatly improve performance on the platform, it is a goal to release in Supabase's primary image once everything is buttoned up. Note that an OrioleDB release doesn't take away any of your existing options. Its implemented as an extension so users would be able to optionally create all heap tables, all orioledb tables, or a mix of both.
Makes sense, perhaps the previous commenter thought OrioleDB was itself a database rather than an implementation detail alternative to current databases. That's what I thought before I went to their site.
Acquisitions don't necessarily mean the end of innovation. Sometimes, it allows them to take innovations they've worked hard on for years and expand the reach to a significantly larger audience :)
I have met the founders of all 3 of these companies and can assure you they all care tremendously about bringing their work to the world.
ParadeDB is independent and without plans to sell anytime soon, though :)
Not hating on Quickwit, but almost never does an acquisition in the modern era mean continual innovation, most companies are now suborned to a greater purpose, and its almost never going to drive them to build the best thing they already have ended their lifecycle - nobody is going to buy them from DD and their quality/dev process will dominate, and that is of a decent size corporation.
It also looks like most of DD's observability acquisitions are either integrated directly (seemingly with a full rewrite) or look a lot like aquihires for senior folks, so I wouldn't hold my breath here.
They already do. For example, for containers you have 5 per host included in the Pro plan (I have more in my hobby projects...) and then you pay extra for each. Their pricing model is quite complex and with time you start to wonder if all these nice features are really worth that high prices.
They have to though, right? If you look at the nonsense people generate in logs, it would be a war crime to not monetize that. 20% of the PB's of data is probably the same 2,100 UTF-16 characters of Windows event id 4624.
> Mezmo recently put in production Quickwit to serve thousands of customers and petabytes of logs, drastically reducing infrastructure cost and complexity while delivering the same user experience.
I can't imagine they feel great about Quickwit getting bought by a competitor after that.
Either they did it on their own, in which case that's open source for you, or they have some kind of contract with quickwit, in which case I'd be really surprised if they don't have some clauses which handle this.
> This summer, the wind started to turn. We witnessed stronger open-source traction, our revenue increased dramatically, and VCs became more insistent. It was time for us to open a new chapter for the company and raise a series A round.
Rhetorically, why was it time for this?
Practically, the answer is right there: the VCs wouldn't accept a mere rapidly-growing company with great tech. It's either an up round so they can mark up the value on their portfolio, or if the market isn't hot enough for a high-priced Series A, force an exit.
> why was it time for this?
Practically, the answer is right there: the VCs wouldn't accept a mere rapidly-growing company with great tech.
Remember that this is a decision you make when you accept the seed money, not when it comes to looking for further money. If you want to build a profitable growing company, bc funding is not the path to that.
Depends, if you have a majority on the board you can do whatever you want. Some companies get a seed round to then use that to bootstrap to profitability and growth over time.
Practically, what happens if the founders don’t want to play ball? VCs can muscle up and force a sale on worse terms? Just not clear how much of what goes on is asking nicely vs coercion, and where the actual leverage lies.
It’s going to depend on what the terms you agreed to are. In my experience, the company leadership are free to suggest an alternative to the hyper growth plan, but the board (which you likely won’t have a majority on) will reject it. VC’s don’t care about recouping money, they’d rather you fired everyone, pivoted, and started again and tried again with the money you have. They want successful exits, not break evens. It’s not about money it’s about reputation.
If you suggest something they don’t like, they’ll stall until you run out of money, or force you out.
Our seed round was 100% made of SAFE, so VCs did not have the power to force us to do anything.
The sentence in the blog post is a tad misleading. I suspect François is not really talking about VCs that had already invested in quickwit, but about the usual flow of other VCs who contacted us, to know about the company and be part of our eventual series A.
It just generally felt like we were "at a crossing".
Thanks for the clarification, and sorry for jumping to an incorrect conclusion based on vague wording. (I would edit my comment accordingly but I can't anymore.)
Is that a rhetorical question, or aimed at me specifically?
Regardless, in my case, it's not my first rodeo; I didn't give up any board seats or majority control. I mostly raised from angels that I know personally and trust me. And we're a high-margin B2B business (apparently similar in those limited respects to Quickwit) so I don't feel particularly capital constrained without raising additional rounds.
So I don't have a board pushing me for "valuation events."
But I am very familiar with this toxic dynamic from my previous experience.
I hate Datadog. We use their name as an epithet at our company for how not to sell/market. Their selling tactics circa 2015-2018 completely burned us out. Endless calls and emails. The icing on the cake was an AWS reInvent presentation on Lambda right when lambda was first announced. We were pumped to get in on lambda early. Got the whole crew to attend the talk. Turned out to be a rudimentary copy of a Barr "lambda up and running" blog wrapped in a stand up comedy routine hawked by a Datadog employee who made sure to tell us he was a Datadog employee. Get us all drunk and happy and think Datadog is cool.
Genuine question: has the company changed enough in the interim to deserve a second look?
The product itself is very good, but the sales process is truly awful. Random calls with non-technical reps unable to answer basic questions like, "now that you've added this to my GCP account for 2 weeks, how much is this going to cost?" They'd say they're not sure but they have a startup deal with $xxxx minimum commit for 12 months gets you two months of extra trial, cancel anytime no questions asked. It's not just bad, it's comically bad.
Different person with similar stance: Those specific examples? Whatever.
We did get absolutely burnt by other manifestations of the DataDog approach: The billing model was (is?) very much not good, transparent or predictable and staying on top of costs was close to a nightmare. The way surprise costs and contract changes (triggered by them) was handled did not feel honest.
The product itself is great but from my perspective it's absolutely not worth having to deal with their business side of things and the risks, costs (money, time, attention) and stress associated.
If I were a Quickwit customer I'd start looking for alternatives.
It made me extremely distrustful of any and all interactions I would have with an employee. Is every email I send to my rep going to turn into an upsell? Are they being straight with me in answering my question?
For me, as much as it pains me to admit this, the sales and account relationship process is just as important of a factor now. I'm at a level where I'm not the end user of most of the infrastructure I purchase for the business, but I'm the one that has to deal with most of the vendor interaction.
Datadog is a pain in the ass. I've got two emails and a voicemail from them just this week. We are not an active customer.
Heroku/Salesforce is also a pain in the ass. It causes enough friction with legal that I'll spend whatever effort it takes to replatform our workload just to not have to have those unending inbound calls.
NS1 was easy-peasy, but post-IBM I now receive a PDF invoice for $50 once per month with no credit card-based billing options and have to remind finance to cut a paper check. I'll be rehoming our DNS as soon as we decide on where to move it to.
tl;dr: the business experience is part of the product
There are multiple possible outcomes from the merge with Datadog.
As my ex manager once told - there is no such thing as nice people in P&L statement. Someone has to pay
It's very easy to be anxious and see the path to the dark side here.
However one of possible outcomes - there will be a valid open source competitor to Grafana ecosystems, and this along secure the rest of scene from relicensing. There is a chance it will be all win-win with clear sustainable path and no money and power struggles for founders.
I want to stay on the positive here. Time will show.
No, no. It's all good and amazing. IMHO Grafana is getting even more important in the light of possible disappearing a solid potential competitor. Hope Datadog will be smart enough with Quickwit and opportunity to win the hearts and minds.
Clearly an opportunity for Datadog to make a big statement here, and change its perceptions.
Loki by Grafana Labs is nice (https://grafana.com/oss/loki/). There was a time (3+ years ago) where the product was changing pretty rapidly and much of the documentation was on git, so we had a few headaches doing minor version bumps, but I believe its much more mature now.
I'm not the person you asked -- and I also want to be transparent that I only PoC-ed it and due to external circumstances didn't get it all the way out to production -- but I really like how https://github.com/metrico/qryn (AGPLv3) thinks about the world. It is, like SigNoz, unified (logs, metrics, traces) but it actually implements several of the common endpoint schemes allowing it to pretend to be "your favorite tool" which plausibly helps any integration story <https://github.com/metrico/qryn#%EF%B8%8F-query> and <https://github.com/metrico/qryn#-vendors-compatibility>. Had I gotten it up and running, I was going to contribute a Splunk ingest adapter since that was what we were trying to replace
I believe one could do that with SigNoz, too, so I don't mean to imply that trickery was qryn specific, just that I didn't want to get into the "constantly resizing io3 PVC" game
> Organizations in financial services, insurance, healthcare, and other regulated industries must meet stringent data residency, privacy, and regulatory requirements while maintaining full visibility into their systems. This becomes challenging when logs need to remain at rest in customers’ environments or specific regions, hindering teams’ ability to attain seamless observability and insight. To help our customers meet these requirements without sacrificing visibility or introducing multiple logging tools, we are pleased to announce that Quickwit—a popular open source distributed search engine—is joining Datadog.
We switched from Datadog to Grafana (do not recommend unless they got you over a barrel on pricing and you need to escape) and one nice thing Grafana gives you is the ability to self-host for local development so you can even run integration tests against your observability... an edge case need but if you need it you're glad it has it.
I’ve historically been a pretty big fan of Grafana, I’ve advocated for the cloud solution at more than one company.
But it seems like business development has utterly hijacked the experience.
The flow you want out of the box is Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo with one button that drops you the config for grafana-agent (now alloy which seems good technically but brings a whole new config language with some truly insane discoverability problems) that makes graphs on screens, you build up from there.
But these days everything is some complicated co-sell, up-sell, click farming hedge maze through 90 kinds of cloud vendor rip-off half baked thing.
Graphs, logs, traces out of the box. Put all the works with Snowflake shit behind an icon. A small one.
Not OP, but looked at doing grafana self hosted for similar reasons. The tooling is too spread out across different installables, the common golden signals and other monitoring metrics have a high learning curve / cliff more like it, and there's not good enough documentation to cover the user from "I want to do a synthetics test on a service to see if it is alive and show the results of that test in a graph"...a journey like that involves 4+ different tools.
DD was just easier to use for everybody, has lots of useful baked-in things we liked to use (apdex scores), and was intuitive enough that non-devs could design their own dashboards. We also found it way easier to collect metrics, traces, and other things.
FWIW none of these things are insurmountable and I suspect you'll eventually reach parity. Datadog lost our business for two reasons 1) Lack of billing transparency and 2) an incompetent account rep who managed to piss off our finance department while also embarrassing our CTO. And to be clear, while we aren't a "whale" our spend was over $6M/yr with Datadog - and the CTO along with the rest of eng leadership were all huge DD fanboys and yet they still managed to burn that bridge to the point where we'll never go back.
>it looks like they're hinting towards offering a 'self-hosted' model
That makes sense. Datadog has been pure SaaS the whole time, which is unusual. Buying a good db engine like Quickwit would be a smart head-start into the on-prem segment which is a natural expansion opportunity.
I've previously made the prediction that Datadog is the new Cisco - can expect lots of acquisitions to be made going forward.
I joined Datadog after the Vector acquisition and now currently am the manager for the Community Open Source Engineering team that works on Vector open source.
Just confirming strongly what ripley12 said, as a person with direct involvement in OSS at Datadog.
I haven't kept super close tabs on it but last year we were hiring for a role to do tech lead stuff and OSS community building for Vector, and yes several of the original Vector employees still work here.
they are planning to allow you to run your logs in your own datacenter/cloud and put something like a proxy there or being built into quickwit that your logs show up in the datadog UI
My guess is you will be billed per gig or something but not nearly the cost of shipping your logs to DD
Sqreen was a great product for startups. Unfortunately acquired by the Datadog. Product was never fully integrated into their offerings and there is no such alternative.
Hey I'm an engineer who worked at Sqreen and now Datadog. What kind of feature is still missing in Datadog ASM? To my knowledge everything is there except managing CSP and security headers now.
Ah yes, we are still missing RASP support on ruby, but this should come out in the next 3-6 months. Everything else should be supported though (In App WAF, playbook, user monitoring etc)
I integrated Quickwit into our o11y platform. It was great tech with lots of promise, and now it's dead. Yet another reason to never do business with Datahog.
Do any engineers actually like DD? Execs/managers seem to love DD and get upsold all the time on it and ask engineers to implement some of their half-baked features. It seems like its good for alerts and dashboards for infrastructure teams. But as an engineer its a pain and using it for log analysis is much more annoying than just tracking down the actual relevant logs and grepping.
Easily the best product in its category. The value is in APM/tracing - if you're just using it for logs you're missing a lot.
If you're used to traditional Enterprise pricing it's fairly priced for the value you get but anybody coming from self-funded or VC it's very expensive. If you're already using Splunk you can afford it.
One of its best features is it's consumption priced not by seats so easy to open up for all of eng including product/QA teams and not just devs to use which is great for breaking down barriers.
It's a bit like aws in that it's a platform - use of one product tends to encourage using more from their suite.
I used to log large apps using kibana and elastic search. Also using the clusterfuck that are all AWS tries at this (cloud watch, log insights.amd whatnot).
Nothing compares to what DD give you in observability.
Having said that, DD should only be an AWS feature. They should buy them for a couple of billions and integrate it as a service for all of AWS infrastructure.
It’s good, I like it. I don’t use the logs product (we splunk) but I’m big fan of the automatic profiling and trace/span stuff. It’s like 50% better UX compared to other tools I’ve tried. But it’s expensive enough we’re always thinking about moving off it. That will be a very sad day for me.
Co-founder of Quickwit here. Seeing our acquisition by Datadog on the HN front page feels like a truly full-circle moment.
HN has been interwoven with Quickwit's journey from the very beginning. Looking back, it's striking to see how our progress is literally chronicled in our HN front-page posts:
- Searching the web for under $1000/month [0]
- A Rust optimization story [1]
- Decentralized cluster membership in Rust [2]
- Filtering a vector with SIMD instructions (AVX-2 and AVX-512) [3]
- Efficient indexing with Quickwit Rust actor framework [4]
- A compressed indexable bitset [5]
- Show HN: Quickwit – OSS Alternative to Elasticsearch, Splunk, Datadog [6]
- Quickwit 0.8: Indexing and Search at Petabyte Scale [7]
- Tantivy – full-text search engine library inspired by Apache Lucene [8]
- Binance built a 100PB log service with Quickwit [9]
- Datadog acquires Quickwit [10]
Each of these front-page appearances was a milestone for us. We put our hearts into writing those engineering articles, hoping to contribute something valuable to our community.
I'm convinced HN played a key role in Quickwit's success by providing visibility, positive feedback, critical comments, and leads that contacted us directly after a front-page post. This community's authenticity and passion for technology are unparalleled. And we're incredibly grateful for this.
Thank you all :)
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27074481
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28955461
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31190586
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674040
[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35785421
[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36519467
[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902042
[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39756367
[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40492834
[9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935701
[10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42648043
I think you forgot to add the links
Anyway tantivy is great! I love pg_search https://www.paradedb.com/blog/introducing_search (which appears to be built by another company, but on top of tantivy, which is a great feature of open source)
Now, I am worried about development being stalled after this acquisition. How does further developing tantivy in the open helps Datadog's bottom line?
I love quickwit, unfortunately datadog has a history of murdering open source (e.g. vector.io halting development and never fixing gross bugs)
Yeah, a Vector dev that is now at Datadog told me that Vector is essentially deprecated.
(Disclaimer: datadog employee)
I joined Datadog after the Vector acquisition and now currently am the manager for the Community Open Source Engineering team that works on Vector open source.
It’s def. not deprecated, but it did take awhile to sort out. It’s not easy figuring out business vs giving away software for free.
Anyways, there’s quite a few issues and GitHub discussions everyday, in addition to Discord chats.
On the contrary, It's quite active lately - https://vector.dev/releases/
I'm using Vector for my own infrastructure and at work, at the time it seemed the best option to ship logs to various destinations. Are there any alternatives?
If you want to check out OpenTelemetry, Otel-collector does the same job - though it's tightly coupled to opentelemetry
pg_search dev here -- Thanks for mentioning us.
Re: Tantivy. I'm hopeful the community Paul and the Quickwit team have built on top of Tantivy will continue to flourish. I'm sure Datadog will build product(s) with Quickwit, which is built on Tantivy and will contribute to it. Many other companies like ours (ParadeDB) and other databases also integrate it. I can't speak for others, but we'll contribute whenever possible. We're currently working on supporting nested documents in Tantivy, for example, and hoping to upstream this work.
While it's reasonable to be concerned, I'd say this is a win for Quickwit, Tantivy and, of course, the well-deserving team behind them.
Congratulations! The fact you and your team managed to built Tantivy is a huge contribution to open source.
As someone who never managed to built a fond relationship with Apache Lucene based products (Solf, Elastic). I was extremely happy to see Tantivy in open source.
BM25 scoring, proper asian language support, speed, memory foot prints, etc - amazing job! Thank you so much!
https://github.com/quickwit-oss/tantivy
IMHO Datadog made a smart move!
If Tantivy itself just stays permanently under Apache2 licence and find a sustainable path to co exist with the rest of open source community - it's all good guys. You are more than deserve a commercial success.
Congrats!!
Well, it looks like Quickwit was going to add an Enterprise license as of earlier this year (PR #5529), which I had been keeping eyes on, but this announcement says they're instead going to relicense as Apache 2.0 so the "community can continue on":
> We will be focused on building a new product with Datadog, and to ensure our open-source community can continue, we will soon release a major update of both Quickwit with a relicense to Apache License 2.0 and tantivy.
So, it looks like we'll get a more liberally licensed Quickwit, but reading between the lines suggests development of it is might otherwise be winding down? It has been pretty nice and stable in my experience, so I can't really complain much. But I was really looking forward to what else it could bring.
Congrats to the team, in any case!
"So, it looks like we'll get a more liberally licensed Quickwit, but reading between the lines suggests development of it is might otherwise be winding down?"
They will stop fulltime day-to-day effort in it themselves, probably because they have been relocated to writing a similar service but closed and integrated in DD, but it seems they want to opensource the current product with a OSI compliant license in the hopes that the community picks up the tab.
I think that's a nice trade. Could have been much worse.
By the way, also note that DD is not a total stranger in the OSS space. They actually opensourced their observability pipeline tooling for general use as Vector, which is a rock solid product. - https://vector.dev/
Vector was already OSS when they acquired the company that created it, timber.
https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-acquires-timber-techn...
And yet they did dedicate some resources on it, until now. Which basically is my point :)
Yes, I've been using Vector since very early on, long before Datadog acquired it, and Datadog have continued ongoing maintenance and feature additions at a slow-but-steady pace, which I think is good. Like Quickwit, Vector is very stable and already quite complete. So I'm not too unhappy.
But Vector is something that complements Datadog's offering very well, so I think that makes sense for them to be good stewards of it. Quickwit is something that somewhat actively competes against them, which is a big difference. I suspect that unlike Vector, Quickwit is probably going to stop seeing any development in pretty short order, unless the devs now can consciously go out of their way to dedicate extra hours to it.
To be clear, I think that the relicense is great, and I think it's very possible that Quickwit will be picked up/forked by someone and maintenance will continue, because it's very good, and I'd really love to see someone do metrics for it as well. So, I'm not all gloomy or anything like that.
They bought Vector - it was always opensource
It's a bit sad that many modern databases were recently acquired. They had the potential to bring a lot of innovations.
1. https://www.warpstream.com/
2. https://www.orioledb.com/
3. https://quickwit.io/
(disclaimer: supabase employee)
OrioleDB continues to be a fully open source and liberally licensed. We're working with the OrioleDB team to provide an initial distribution channel so they can focus on the storage engine vs hosting + providing lots of user feedback/bug reports. Our shared goal is to advance OrioleDB until it becomes the go-to storage engine for Postgres, both on Supabase and everywhere else.
Happy to hear any concerns you have
Please forgive and help remedy my ignorance: it's a coherent goal to want OrioleDB to be the go-to storage engine for Postgres, on Supabase?
I don't want to hijack Datadogs+Quickwit's post comment section with unrelated promotional-looking info. Quick summary below but if you have any other questions pls tag olirice in a Supabase GH discussion.
The OrioleDB storage engine for postgres is a drop-in replacement for the default heap method. Its takes advantage of modern hardware (e.g. SSDs) and cloud infrastructure. The most basic benefit is that throughput at scale is > 5x higher than heap [1], but it also is architected for a bunch of other cool stuff [2]. copy-on-write unblocks branching. row-level-WAL enables an S3 backend and scale-to-zero compute. The combination of those two makes it a suitable target for multi-master.
So yes, given that it could greatly improve performance on the platform, it is a goal to release in Supabase's primary image once everything is buttoned up. Note that an OrioleDB release doesn't take away any of your existing options. Its implemented as an extension so users would be able to optionally create all heap tables, all orioledb tables, or a mix of both.
[1] https://www.orioledb.com/blog/orioledb-beta7-benchmarks
[2] https://www.orioledb.com/docs
Makes sense, perhaps the previous commenter thought OrioleDB was itself a database rather than an implementation detail alternative to current databases. That's what I thought before I went to their site.
Yes, exactly. :)
Thanks! TIL
Acquisitions don't necessarily mean the end of innovation. Sometimes, it allows them to take innovations they've worked hard on for years and expand the reach to a significantly larger audience :)
I have met the founders of all 3 of these companies and can assure you they all care tremendously about bringing their work to the world.
ParadeDB is independent and without plans to sell anytime soon, though :)
Not hating on Quickwit, but almost never does an acquisition in the modern era mean continual innovation, most companies are now suborned to a greater purpose, and its almost never going to drive them to build the best thing they already have ended their lifecycle - nobody is going to buy them from DD and their quality/dev process will dominate, and that is of a decent size corporation.
It also looks like most of DD's observability acquisitions are either integrated directly (seemingly with a full rewrite) or look a lot like aquihires for senior folks, so I wouldn't hold my breath here.
The clock begins counting down to Datadog figuring out how to charge per node, cpu, container, RAM (KB), and unicode characters indexed.
They already do. For example, for containers you have 5 per host included in the Pro plan (I have more in my hobby projects...) and then you pay extra for each. Their pricing model is quite complex and with time you start to wonder if all these nice features are really worth that high prices.
Isn't this what they already do? Log pricing is per ingested GB and monitoring is charged per node.
They have to though, right? If you look at the nonsense people generate in logs, it would be a war crime to not monetize that. 20% of the PB's of data is probably the same 2,100 UTF-16 characters of Windows event id 4624.
> Mezmo recently put in production Quickwit to serve thousands of customers and petabytes of logs, drastically reducing infrastructure cost and complexity while delivering the same user experience.
I can't imagine they feel great about Quickwit getting bought by a competitor after that.
It's a risk you deal with giving back to open source.
The good part for the rest of us is it's a signal that there's likely some appetite for a fork if Datadog screws the pooch.
Either they did it on their own, in which case that's open source for you, or they have some kind of contract with quickwit, in which case I'd be really surprised if they don't have some clauses which handle this.
> This summer, the wind started to turn. We witnessed stronger open-source traction, our revenue increased dramatically, and VCs became more insistent. It was time for us to open a new chapter for the company and raise a series A round.
Rhetorically, why was it time for this?
Practically, the answer is right there: the VCs wouldn't accept a mere rapidly-growing company with great tech. It's either an up round so they can mark up the value on their portfolio, or if the market isn't hot enough for a high-priced Series A, force an exit.
> why was it time for this? Practically, the answer is right there: the VCs wouldn't accept a mere rapidly-growing company with great tech.
Remember that this is a decision you make when you accept the seed money, not when it comes to looking for further money. If you want to build a profitable growing company, bc funding is not the path to that.
Depends, if you have a majority on the board you can do whatever you want. Some companies get a seed round to then use that to bootstrap to profitability and growth over time.
Practically, what happens if the founders don’t want to play ball? VCs can muscle up and force a sale on worse terms? Just not clear how much of what goes on is asking nicely vs coercion, and where the actual leverage lies.
It’s going to depend on what the terms you agreed to are. In my experience, the company leadership are free to suggest an alternative to the hyper growth plan, but the board (which you likely won’t have a majority on) will reject it. VC’s don’t care about recouping money, they’d rather you fired everyone, pivoted, and started again and tried again with the money you have. They want successful exits, not break evens. It’s not about money it’s about reputation.
If you suggest something they don’t like, they’ll stall until you run out of money, or force you out.
Our seed round was 100% made of SAFE, so VCs did not have the power to force us to do anything.
The sentence in the blog post is a tad misleading. I suspect François is not really talking about VCs that had already invested in quickwit, but about the usual flow of other VCs who contacted us, to know about the company and be part of our eventual series A.
It just generally felt like we were "at a crossing".
No one twisted our arm.
Thanks for the clarification, and sorry for jumping to an incorrect conclusion based on vague wording. (I would edit my comment accordingly but I can't anymore.)
You're a founder who raised seed and now appear to be hitting PMF and making repeatable sales, won't you raise A to scale?
Is that a rhetorical question, or aimed at me specifically?
Regardless, in my case, it's not my first rodeo; I didn't give up any board seats or majority control. I mostly raised from angels that I know personally and trust me. And we're a high-margin B2B business (apparently similar in those limited respects to Quickwit) so I don't feel particularly capital constrained without raising additional rounds.
So I don't have a board pushing me for "valuation events." But I am very familiar with this toxic dynamic from my previous experience.
Related:
Binance built a 100PB log service with Quickwit (228 points, 6 months ago, 195 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935701
Show HN: Quickwit – OSS Alternative to Elasticsearch, Splunk, Datadog (145 points, 1 year ago, 51 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902042
* note to myself: build a successful product that threatens large slow moving legacy provider and get quickly acqui-hired
Is that not the standard disruption play?
I hate Datadog. We use their name as an epithet at our company for how not to sell/market. Their selling tactics circa 2015-2018 completely burned us out. Endless calls and emails. The icing on the cake was an AWS reInvent presentation on Lambda right when lambda was first announced. We were pumped to get in on lambda early. Got the whole crew to attend the talk. Turned out to be a rudimentary copy of a Barr "lambda up and running" blog wrapped in a stand up comedy routine hawked by a Datadog employee who made sure to tell us he was a Datadog employee. Get us all drunk and happy and think Datadog is cool.
Genuine question: has the company changed enough in the interim to deserve a second look?
What does any of that have to do with the actual product?
The product itself is very good, but the sales process is truly awful. Random calls with non-technical reps unable to answer basic questions like, "now that you've added this to my GCP account for 2 weeks, how much is this going to cost?" They'd say they're not sure but they have a startup deal with $xxxx minimum commit for 12 months gets you two months of extra trial, cancel anytime no questions asked. It's not just bad, it's comically bad.
Different person with similar stance: Those specific examples? Whatever.
We did get absolutely burnt by other manifestations of the DataDog approach: The billing model was (is?) very much not good, transparent or predictable and staying on top of costs was close to a nightmare. The way surprise costs and contract changes (triggered by them) was handled did not feel honest.
The product itself is great but from my perspective it's absolutely not worth having to deal with their business side of things and the risks, costs (money, time, attention) and stress associated.
If I were a Quickwit customer I'd start looking for alternatives.
qw is open source so you can continue to use the foss-licensed software as it is
It made me extremely distrustful of any and all interactions I would have with an employee. Is every email I send to my rep going to turn into an upsell? Are they being straight with me in answering my question?
For me, as much as it pains me to admit this, the sales and account relationship process is just as important of a factor now. I'm at a level where I'm not the end user of most of the infrastructure I purchase for the business, but I'm the one that has to deal with most of the vendor interaction.
Datadog is a pain in the ass. I've got two emails and a voicemail from them just this week. We are not an active customer.
Heroku/Salesforce is also a pain in the ass. It causes enough friction with legal that I'll spend whatever effort it takes to replatform our workload just to not have to have those unending inbound calls.
NS1 was easy-peasy, but post-IBM I now receive a PDF invoice for $50 once per month with no credit card-based billing options and have to remind finance to cut a paper check. I'll be rehoming our DNS as soon as we decide on where to move it to.
tl;dr: the business experience is part of the product
That is their product. You want to cancel? Send the army of clowns.
There are multiple possible outcomes from the merge with Datadog.
As my ex manager once told - there is no such thing as nice people in P&L statement. Someone has to pay
It's very easy to be anxious and see the path to the dark side here.
However one of possible outcomes - there will be a valid open source competitor to Grafana ecosystems, and this along secure the rest of scene from relicensing. There is a chance it will be all win-win with clear sustainable path and no money and power struggles for founders.
I want to stay on the positive here. Time will show.
> there will be a valid open source competitor to Grafana ecosystems
You may want to check out SigNoz [1] - takes a all in one app approach compared to different modules for each signal approach which Grafana takes
Disclaimer : I am one of the maintainers
[1] https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz
Is Grafana and its ecosystem no longer open source? I haven't used it in a while
No, no. It's all good and amazing. IMHO Grafana is getting even more important in the light of possible disappearing a solid potential competitor. Hope Datadog will be smart enough with Quickwit and opportunity to win the hearts and minds.
Clearly an opportunity for Datadog to make a big statement here, and change its perceptions.
I have had the opposite experience. Sales has been really respectful of our time.
Agreed. Once they had a whiff of our domain every engineer was being bombarded with emails like “Re: meeting next week”.
> Get us all drunk and happy
Damn I never get sales pitches like that.
The name is perfect, Data DOG.
We just moved from Elastic to Quickwit. Sigh. What other open source, object storage backed logging databases do people recommend?
Loki by Grafana Labs is nice (https://grafana.com/oss/loki/). There was a time (3+ years ago) where the product was changing pretty rapidly and much of the documentation was on git, so we had a few headaches doing minor version bumps, but I believe its much more mature now.
Just don’t look at the list of open issues and the lack of responses.
Loki is significantly different in several ways, including the lack of full-text indexing.
I suggest giving SigNoz a try. Built on top of Clickhouse, it’s fast and scalable
https://github.com/SigNoz/signoz
PS: I am maintainer at SigNoz
what another open source you can recommend ?
I'm not the person you asked -- and I also want to be transparent that I only PoC-ed it and due to external circumstances didn't get it all the way out to production -- but I really like how https://github.com/metrico/qryn (AGPLv3) thinks about the world. It is, like SigNoz, unified (logs, metrics, traces) but it actually implements several of the common endpoint schemes allowing it to pretend to be "your favorite tool" which plausibly helps any integration story <https://github.com/metrico/qryn#%EF%B8%8F-query> and <https://github.com/metrico/qryn#-vendors-compatibility>. Had I gotten it up and running, I was going to contribute a Splunk ingest adapter since that was what we were trying to replace
I was going to take advantage of Clickhouse using S3 as warm-to-cold storage since my mental model is that most logs, metrics, and traces are written and not read https://clickhouse.com/docs/en/integrations/s3#configuring-s...
I believe one could do that with SigNoz, too, so I don't mean to imply that trickery was qryn specific, just that I didn't want to get into the "constantly resizing io3 PVC" game
qryn developer here, thanks for the mention and for the kind words! hope we'll get another shot in the future!
Maybe Loki, but it has some limitations related to high cardinality data and indices (https://signoz.io/blog/logs-performance-benchmark/?utm_sourc...)
Curious what Datadog is going to build with this tech. Believe this company pitching themselves as OSS competitor to Datadog a few months ago.
Based on the [press release](https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/datadog-acquires-quickwit/) it looks like they're hinting towards offering a 'self-hosted' model for customers that can't use pure SaaS solutions due to regulations:
> Organizations in financial services, insurance, healthcare, and other regulated industries must meet stringent data residency, privacy, and regulatory requirements while maintaining full visibility into their systems. This becomes challenging when logs need to remain at rest in customers’ environments or specific regions, hindering teams’ ability to attain seamless observability and insight. To help our customers meet these requirements without sacrificing visibility or introducing multiple logging tools, we are pleased to announce that Quickwit—a popular open source distributed search engine—is joining Datadog.
We switched from Datadog to Grafana (do not recommend unless they got you over a barrel on pricing and you need to escape) and one nice thing Grafana gives you is the ability to self-host for local development so you can even run integration tests against your observability... an edge case need but if you need it you're glad it has it.
I work at Grafana. Can you say more about what specifically you don’t recommend?
I’ve historically been a pretty big fan of Grafana, I’ve advocated for the cloud solution at more than one company.
But it seems like business development has utterly hijacked the experience.
The flow you want out of the box is Prometheus, Loki, and Tempo with one button that drops you the config for grafana-agent (now alloy which seems good technically but brings a whole new config language with some truly insane discoverability problems) that makes graphs on screens, you build up from there.
But these days everything is some complicated co-sell, up-sell, click farming hedge maze through 90 kinds of cloud vendor rip-off half baked thing.
Graphs, logs, traces out of the box. Put all the works with Snowflake shit behind an icon. A small one.
Not OP, but looked at doing grafana self hosted for similar reasons. The tooling is too spread out across different installables, the common golden signals and other monitoring metrics have a high learning curve / cliff more like it, and there's not good enough documentation to cover the user from "I want to do a synthetics test on a service to see if it is alive and show the results of that test in a graph"...a journey like that involves 4+ different tools.
DD was just easier to use for everybody, has lots of useful baked-in things we liked to use (apdex scores), and was intuitive enough that non-devs could design their own dashboards. We also found it way easier to collect metrics, traces, and other things.
FWIW none of these things are insurmountable and I suspect you'll eventually reach parity. Datadog lost our business for two reasons 1) Lack of billing transparency and 2) an incompetent account rep who managed to piss off our finance department while also embarrassing our CTO. And to be clear, while we aren't a "whale" our spend was over $6M/yr with Datadog - and the CTO along with the rest of eng leadership were all huge DD fanboys and yet they still managed to burn that bridge to the point where we'll never go back.
>it looks like they're hinting towards offering a 'self-hosted' model
That makes sense. Datadog has been pure SaaS the whole time, which is unusual. Buying a good db engine like Quickwit would be a smart head-start into the on-prem segment which is a natural expansion opportunity.
I've previously made the prediction that Datadog is the new Cisco - can expect lots of acquisitions to be made going forward.
A larger bill for enterprise customers.
arguably they acquired them so they dont build anything further with this tech, as it threatens renewals of their existing enterprise contracts
Pretty clear they want it to keep a moat on their side. Can't see Datadog continuing investing in this - it's a pretty direct competitor.
What happened to Vector the last opensource they bought? Are they still hired?
(Disclaimer: also datadog employee)
I joined Datadog after the Vector acquisition and now currently am the manager for the Community Open Source Engineering team that works on Vector open source.
Just confirming strongly what ripley12 said, as a person with direct involvement in OSS at Datadog.
(disclaimer: Datadog employee)
I haven't kept super close tabs on it but last year we were hiring for a role to do tech lead stuff and OSS community building for Vector, and yes several of the original Vector employees still work here.
I could only imagine they want to replace their existing infra with this as a potential cost saving measure.
The architecture of Husky seems fairly similar to quickwit. https://www.datadoghq.com/blog/engineering/introducing-husky... https://quickwit.io/docs/main-branch/overview/architecture
It’s an ourobouros of influences: the Husky creators left DD to make Warpstream, Warpstream inspired Quickwit, and now Quickwit is joining DD.
No. Quickwit was founded well before Warpstream and it did not inspire us.
The Husky blog post was released after we released a few versions of quickwit if I recall correctly. It was not an inspiration either.
As far as I know, the similarities are fortuitous.
and Confluent acquired WarpStream
And then I'm sure they'll pass the savings onto customers given the current crazy high prices.
they are planning to allow you to run your logs in your own datacenter/cloud and put something like a proxy there or being built into quickwit that your logs show up in the datadog UI
My guess is you will be billed per gig or something but not nearly the cost of shipping your logs to DD
Happy that Quickwit is going to Apache 2. Sad that the team won't be working on it anymore.
I loved that I was able to setup Quickwit on AWS lambda and have a good cloud based search engine for $0.01 / month.
Interesting comment. Any thoughts on what you can use now?
The same thing? The community will maintain it
Hoping this leads to datadog launching a logging solution that does not cost an arm and a leg at scale.
Based on my experience with them, this isn't a technical or product issue, but a cultural one. (DD is very sales-driven, in a bad way)
Honestly this is my only criticism of datadog. The product is great but good lord that pricing.
[dead]
Sqreen was a great product for startups. Unfortunately acquired by the Datadog. Product was never fully integrated into their offerings and there is no such alternative.
Hey I'm an engineer who worked at Sqreen and now Datadog. What kind of feature is still missing in Datadog ASM? To my knowledge everything is there except managing CSP and security headers now.
Few months ago when I’ve tried it there was no full support for ruby language.
Ah yes, we are still missing RASP support on ruby, but this should come out in the next 3-6 months. Everything else should be supported though (In App WAF, playbook, user monitoring etc)
I integrated Quickwit into our o11y platform. It was great tech with lots of promise, and now it's dead. Yet another reason to never do business with Datahog.
How much did they get acquired for?
Do any engineers actually like DD? Execs/managers seem to love DD and get upsold all the time on it and ask engineers to implement some of their half-baked features. It seems like its good for alerts and dashboards for infrastructure teams. But as an engineer its a pain and using it for log analysis is much more annoying than just tracking down the actual relevant logs and grepping.
Easily the best product in its category. The value is in APM/tracing - if you're just using it for logs you're missing a lot.
If you're used to traditional Enterprise pricing it's fairly priced for the value you get but anybody coming from self-funded or VC it's very expensive. If you're already using Splunk you can afford it.
One of its best features is it's consumption priced not by seats so easy to open up for all of eng including product/QA teams and not just devs to use which is great for breaking down barriers.
It's a bit like aws in that it's a platform - use of one product tends to encourage using more from their suite.
Second this.
I used to log large apps using kibana and elastic search. Also using the clusterfuck that are all AWS tries at this (cloud watch, log insights.amd whatnot).
Nothing compares to what DD give you in observability.
Having said that, DD should only be an AWS feature. They should buy them for a couple of billions and integrate it as a service for all of AWS infrastructure.
> They should buy them for a couple of billions
DD has a market cap of $48B
Which just meant that when the business had sticker shock they just disabled all the useful features of DD which consumed so much.
It’s good, I like it. I don’t use the logs product (we splunk) but I’m big fan of the automatic profiling and trace/span stuff. It’s like 50% better UX compared to other tools I’ve tried. But it’s expensive enough we’re always thinking about moving off it. That will be a very sad day for me.
My biggest issue with them is the absolutely, hilariously, ridiculously expensive custom metrics.
Large json logs just won’t appear for hours, which makes it so fun to debug issues in deployed environments!
Showing ALL the logs isn’t cool. Showing SOME logs at random is cool.
DD is the Oracle/SAP of o11y. Scumbags that kill innovation.
It's just a solution to garbage distributed cloud service logs and devs that don't know how to log an application.
Come on this is HN, the news / link aggregator of a VC: tell us how much the exit was in $$$ ;-)