Everybody loves free. It is the best marketing term one could
use. Once you say “FREE” the people come running. Free makes you
very popular. Whether you are a politician offering something for
free, or a company providing free stuff, you gain instant
popularity.
Xeround is
shutting down their MySQL Database as a Service (DBaaS) because their
free instances, while popular, simply did not convert into
sufficient paid instances to support the company. While I am sad
to see them fail, because I appreciate the hard work required to
deliver database technology, this announcement was not
unexpected.
My company was at Percona Live, the MySQL conference, and I had
some additional conversations along these same lines. One
previously closed source company announced that they were open
sourcing their code, it was a very …
Everybody loves free. It is the best marketing term one could
use. Once you say “FREE” the people come running. Free makes you
very popular. Whether you are a politician offering something for
free, or a company providing free stuff, you gain instant
popularity.
Xeround is shutting down their MySQL Database as a Service (DBaaS) because their free instances, while popular, simply did not convert into sufficient paid instances to support the company. While I am sad to see them fail, because I appreciate the hard work required to deliver database technology, this announcement was not unexpected. My company was at Percona Live, the MySQL conference, and I had some additional conversations along these same lines. One previously closed source company announced that they were open sourcing their code, it was a very popular …
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I'm looking forward to presenting, along with Peter Boros, Jim
Cooley and Vipul Sabhaya, at the Percona Live Conference the week
of April 22nd where I will be giving two talks about the
management of MySQL using Chef (http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2013/sessions/managing-mysql-chef
24 April 4:30pm - 5:20pm @ Ballroom A) and Red Dwarf, the
Openstack project that HPCS is using for DBaaS (http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2013/sessions/reddwarf-database-service-openstack-project
25 April 11:00am - 11:50am @ Ballroom C).
I wanted to do a Chef talk, despite my on-again, off-again
love/hate relationship with Chef (AKA learning process) because
for the past year or so, I have …