
Microsoft acquires Citus Data (YC S11) - whatok
https://blogs.microsoft.com/blog/2019/01/24/microsoft-acquires-citus-data-re-affirming-its-commitment-to-open-source-and-accelerating-azure-postgresql-performance-and-scale/
======
cdbattags
In the latest world of Postgres:

\- we now have closed source Amazon Aurora infrastructure that boasts
performance gains that might never see it back upstream (who knows if it's
just hardware or software or what behind the scenes here)

\- we now have Amazon DocumentDB that is a closed source MongoDB-like
scripting interface with Postgres under the hood

\- lastly, with this news, looks like Microsoft is now doubling down on the
same strategy to build out infrastructure and _possibly_ closed source
"forked" wins on top of the beautiful open source world that is Postgres

Please, please, please let's be sure to upstream! I love the cloud but when I
go to "snapshot" and "restore" my PG DB I want a little transparency how y'all
are doing this. Same with DocumentDB; I'd love an article of how they are
using JSONB indices at this supposed scale! Not trying to throw shade; just
raising my eyebrows a little.

~~~
ABeeSea
If the creators of Postgres wanted all improvements to be upstreamed, they
wouldn’t have released under a permissive license. The ability to use Postgres
commercially without exposing your entire codebase to copyleft risk is one of
the reasons it’s used commercially in the first place.

~~~
scarface74
And this is a benefit to prevent lock-in. Amazon’s OLAP database, Redshift, is
protocol compliant with Postgres. Even if you won’t get the performance
benefits of Redshift if you move to a standard Postgres, at least you don’t
have to change your code.

Now you can move to Azure without having to change your code.

~~~
Someone
That doesn’t really prevent lock-in. You may not be locked in _now_ , but that
compatibility can end whenever Amazon wants it to end.

~~~
scarface74
If that compatibility ends, it might as well be a new product. Every client
that connects to Redshift uses a standard Postgres driver.

------
Smerity
The big news here: Citus Data donated 1% of their equity to non-profit
PostgreSQL organizations[1] so this acquisition is a win for the community
even in the darkest scenario of Citus Data disappearing into a canyon on the
Microsoft campus.

Given Microsoft's change in operation over recent years there's also hope that
they can continue their contributions into the future.

It's fascinating to see Microsoft leave behind the "embrace, extend,
extinguish" narrative only to have Amazon adopt it, causing massive rifts and
action within the database community[2][3]. I am genuinely concerned about the
future of open source software in this continued scenario.

An article with what I considered an outrageous headline ("Is Amazon 'strip
mining' open source?"[4]) has only rung more true over time. Amazon is one of
the largest companies on earth, selling products that they receive for free
but never improve[5], attacking the primary open source provider, and then
shift toward their comparable proprietary closed offerings.

Hopefully new ways to "give back", such as equity contribution, can be one of
the many paths forward needed to keep open source software healthy. Given how
much innovation is unlocked by this, it'd be a crime to go back to the past
era.

[1]: [https://www.citusdata.com/newsroom/press/citus-data-
donates-...](https://www.citusdata.com/newsroom/press/citus-data-
donates-1-percent-equity-to-non-profit-postgresql-organizations/)

[2]: [https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/30/aws-is-competing-with-its-
cu...](https://www.cnbc.com/2018/11/30/aws-is-competing-with-its-
customers.html)

[3]: [https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/aws-gives-open-source-
the-...](https://techcrunch.com/2019/01/09/aws-gives-open-source-the-middle-
finger/)

[4]: [https://www.cbronline.com/analysis/aws-managed-
kafka](https://www.cbronline.com/analysis/aws-managed-kafka)

[5]: From [2], "Jay Kreps, a creator of Kafka and co-founder and CEO of
Confluent ... said Amazon has not contributed a single line of code to the
Apache Kafka open-source software and is not reselling Confluent’s cloud
tool."

~~~
koolba
Any clue what the base for that 1% is going to be? Didn’t see any mention of
the total acquisition amount anywhere.

~~~
weinerk
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18295756](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18295756)

------
craigkerstiens
In case folks are interested here are the details from our founders on the
Citus blog - [https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2019/01/24/microsoft-
acquires...](https://www.citusdata.com/blog/2019/01/24/microsoft-acquires-
citus-data/)

------
jarym
Well this is great news for the guys at Citus - they created something great
as a Postgres add-on and a big chunk of it was open sourced.

They made a decent cloud business model out of it (no idea how successful but
everyone I asked was happy with it).

I just hope Microsoft allow the tech to evolve as open source!

~~~
iKevinShah
"I just hope Microsoft allow the tech to evolve as open source!"

Current Microsoft sure will. They're good with open source stuff.

~~~
shangxiao
What about future Microsoft? :)

------
manigandham
Citus is already used by Microsoft itself internally, a recent example being
the VeniceDB project to analyze Windows telemetry:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeMaBwd90SI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AeMaBwd90SI)

Considering the competitive database landscape, this is a compelling offering
to add to any cloud portfolio. Congrats to the Citus team.

~~~
skunkworker
I still can't get over the fact that Microsoft is using Postgres internally,
if you had told me that 5 years ago I wouldn't have believed it. Did they go
into why over MSSQL?

~~~
manigandham
MSSQL currently does not have horizontal sharding capabilities like this, or
easy UPSERT functionality.

~~~
plasma
I've dabbled with SQL Data Warehouse (via Azure); wouldn't this be the
horizontal functionality? It has some limitations, but curious how it compares
to Citus.

~~~
manigandham
Yes but that's a different product designed with columnstores and still
missing the upsert. This use-case was for lots of telemetry data that had high
updates and very selective queries using indexes rather than large
aggregations. Scale-out OLTP was better suited for these analytics than a
normal OLAP system.

~~~
plasma
Thank you makes sense

------
pritambarhate
The main question is: Did MS want an expert PgSQL team to work on Azure
PostgreSQL (and may to create a proprietary competitor to Aurora)? Or Did they
acquire Citus for its product, to improve and market it further?

It feels like it was the first. If so, it means bad news for Citus product as
it will most likely be ignored for a while. That will be really sad, as I
don't know any actively supported automated sharding solution for PgSQL other
than Citus. There is PostgresXL[1], but there isn't much focus to make it
community friendly.

[1]: [https://www.postgres-xl.org/overview/](https://www.postgres-
xl.org/overview/)

~~~
mjw1007
I don't think anyone should expect acquihiring an expert Postgres team to work
on a proprietary product to work well, because the programmers' skills are
eminently transferrable.

Half the team would probably wander off to work for one of the other postgres-
centered companies (and quite possibly continue to work on the open source
Citus code).

~~~
bgentry
Fun fact: the team that built Citus Cloud began with 3 people that came over
from Heroku after building its (proprietary) Postgres cloud service.

------
tosh
Great news for Citus, Microsoft, Postgres and for people using open source
relational databases. This makes so much sense. (I know this comment might
read naive to some but I’m genuinely excited right now)

~~~
tracker1
I'm pretty excited as well... Especially if this means improvements to Azure's
PostgreSQL options. DBaaS is one of the areas where cloud providers give a
_LOT_ of value, more so as long as the interfaces you use can be used
internally/locally for development.

Similarly, I really appreciate MS-SQL for Linux on Docker as it is a lot
easier to setup for CI/CD and local for dev and testing and is nearly
transparent going to Azure SQL or MS SQL Enterprise for hosted deployments.
I'd much rather use PostgreSQL with PLv8 than MS-SQL though.

------
AlexB138
I wonder how long it will be before they shutdown their own Citus Cloud hosted
offering, which is hosted on AWS. Seems obvious that will become part of Azure
soon.

~~~
btown
I doubt they'd disrupt their AWS operations right away - this certainly won't
be the first time that a MSFT team/subsidiary has used AWS.

What's more worrying to me is if they try to do both - build out a Citus
offering on Azure, and simultaneously try to keep high-reliability of their
AWS Citus Cloud, which may be the most reliable option for some time. It's
tough for any organization, no matter how much capital has been injected, to
keep a laser-sharp eye on two inevitably-competing initiatives, each of which
have their own performance and automation characteristics. I don't want the
one person in the company who knows, say, cloud hard drive recovery patterns
like the back of their hand and had previously been the EBS guru, to suddenly
be pulled into the new Azure optimization project... and that's not something
that capital injections can necessarily fix.

That said, this could accelerate their development timelines overall, and it
guarantees stability for the product for quite a while. Overall I think this
is good news! Citus is one of those things that you want to have in your back
pocket when building any type of app on Postgres, and we certainly see it in
our company as a long-term "escape hatch" when we're forced to make database-
heavy design decisions at currently relatively-small scale. This deal keeps it
alive and prospering!

------
peterwwillis
It's going to be _really_ funny if Microsoft ends up using Open Source
software to compete against its proprietary service-based competitors. Sort of
like how GCP runs k8s... you can use the free tool, or you can use the managed
service, and the community helps build the thing. In theory, you retain
competitive advantage because you have the most expertise in the product.

The Googles of the world lose out on professional services, but Microsoft
could still make a bundle of money by just consulting on the tools without
even managing them. You might even make higher margins by _not_ managing the
service.

------
areohbe
Congrats Citus team. Just please keep the blog alive! Craig's post are some of
my favorite Postgres reads.

------
reacharavindh
So, a part of Microsoft will advocate for SQL server, and another part will
develop for PostgreSQL? Isn't it weird? Why would Microsoft want this?

~~~
nradov
Microsoft is hedging their bets. PostgreSQL has the potential to disrupt the
traditional relational database market, so if they're going to be disrupted
then better to do it themselves.

I expect they'll also try to port Citus Data functionality to the SQL Server
platform.

~~~
manigandham
Postgres is a nice open-source platform but the commercial engines are far
more advanced in many areas and are not going to be disrupted anytime soon. If
you can use Postgres for your needs today than it's likely that any relational
system would've worked and you didn't need a commercial system in the first
place.

SQL Server platform already has one of the most advanced optimizers and
distributed planning with its use in Polybase, stretch tables, SQL MPP and
Azure SQL DW.

~~~
grumpydba
They are more advanced in many levels, a bit behind on the dev friendliness
side (postgres is kind there), that's true.

However I manage roughly 2000 instances of commercial databases. I'd say maybe
a 10th could not be hosted on postgres.

It gives postgres a huge disruption potential and the management, in all the
big firms I know, is actively looking at it.

~~~
manigandham
Yes, PG has many more usability features. Simple things like UPSERT make UX
improvements if you don't need the advanced capabilities of MSSQL.

I'm sure PG can take on more of the standard RDBMS workloads today but I don't
think that's really making a big dent on SQL Server as the bulk of their
revenue comes from the serious enterprise scenarios.

~~~
grumpydba
> I don't think that's really making a big dent on SQL Server as the bulk of
> their revenue comes from the serious enterprise scenarios.

I'd say postgres can take 90% of the revenues. I've worked in 3 of the top 10
european banks. Most of the SQL Server instances do not even need
partitioning, for example. Let alone always on, hekaton and so forth.

People mostly buy peace of mind. Until they are charged millions and start
questioning the stupid expensive bills saying "do we need that ?"

Really I have all the metrics to back this up: CPU usage/Availability
requirements/data size... It is literally my job to collect those.

Also, proper window support, great postgis, great json support, open source
ecosystem support are not simple and huge cost savers.

~~~
manigandham
Revenue for what? Postgres is free.

If you mean the licensing and support from commercial distributions and
vendors then, as you already recognize, these decisions will fall to which
vendor they trust more. That will usually end up being Microsoft.

~~~
jeltz
Proffesional PostgreSQL support is not free, and the banks would most likely
buy support from some company just like they currently support for SQL Server.

~~~
manigandham
>>> "If you mean the licensing and support from commercial distributions and
vendors then, as you already recognize, these decisions will fall to which
vendor they trust more."

Enterprises are more than just banks, and vendor relationships matter. They're
not fungible and are rarely based on price.

------
talawahdotnet
A little off topic, but I wonder how long it will be before MS acquires Docker
Inc. Seems like an even better fit for them now that they own GitHub. GitHub +
Docker Hub on the developer engagement side and Docker Enterprise on the
traditional enterprise side.

~~~
barbecue_sauce
I'm wondering how much the OCI and CRI-O has impacted Docker's value
proposition. Docker Hub seems more and more like the real product, though I
guess you could argue that the container runtime was never really a product in
the first place.

~~~
talawahdotnet
Private repos on Docker Hub is definitely a product, especially if you provide
a seamless path for moving from source code on GitHub to images on Docker Hub
to containers deployed in the cloud or on premise.

MS could certainly also do good business selling Docker's friendly Enterprise
orchestration tools (including their new Kubernetes based tool) which check
all the Enterprise requirements for security, policy, identity management etc.

------
mmsimanga
I haven't used Citus but once thought about Cstore_fdw. How much of this is
about Cstore_fdw? I am curious because in data warehousing space my experience
has been column store databases totally rule when it comes to speed on
analytics. I know SQL Server has column store indexes but that requires you to
create them whereas with genuine column store you get the performance boost by
virtue of how data is stored.

~~~
massaman_yams
Very little, I'm guessing; cstore_fdw is not remotely competitive with mature
analytics DBMS.

see here:
[https://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html](https://tech.marksblogg.com/benchmarks.html)

~~~
mmsimanga
Great link, thanks for sharing.

------
diminish
Does anyone know any details about the financials of the deal? Is this an
acquihire or more?

~~~
simonw
There's no way this was just an acquire: Citus represents some truly
impressive computer science.

~~~
andrewstuart
Impressive computer science does not at all correlate with commercial success.

If anything, that makes it more likely to be an acquihire.

------
jchristopherinc
Happy for the folks at Citus. I use Citus at work and it's amazing. Hope
things stays the same after the acquisition.

~~~
jaxn
My sentiments as well. Great team to work with and really like the product.

------
oarabbus_
Speaking as a data professional and SQL addict, I was always impressed when I
came across Citus Data posts. Good acquisition by Microsoft.

------
Apaec
Why is an acquisition a win for the company? Seems to me like the big company
is killing the small one and absorbing its soul(brand).

Shouldn't sustainability be the primary goal instead of making big bucks
temporarily?

------
taormina
So, how much did YC make?

------
sam0x17
Maybe now they will actually add a free tier so people can sign up for this,
develop their product using a free tier, and upgrade when they launch, as is
the natural progression with most other cloud products. I think before there
were some complexity and/or financial issues preventing this but with
Microsoft's wallet it shouldn't be an issue.

~~~
aidos
There’s a community version.

~~~
sam0x17
That doesn't really help. What I want is a seamless service I can just spin up
an SQL server on with some cheap or free plan and tiny capacity, and then have
it horizontally scale based on usage without me ever having to do or change
anything, potentially to the point where it's dealing with terabytes and
terabytes of data, thousands of connections, a large monthly bill, etc.
Google's Cloud Spanner was supposed to be this, but the minimum monthly fee is
$90ish which makes it impractical for anyone who doesn't want to waste money
while developing. Citus has traditionally turned up its nose on HN at users
who don't already have a massive database, but you gotta start somewhere, and
the product is a lot better if you can stay in the same DB ecosystem from 0
users to 1,000,000 users and beyond.

e.g. something like the free "tiny turtle" plan here:
[https://www.elephantsql.com/plans.html](https://www.elephantsql.com/plans.html),
but that can auto-scale up to citus-scale things, without user intervention,
as needed.

------
yingw787
Congratulations to the Citus Data team! I don't have anything significant to
add, but I loved the free socks you gave out :)

~~~
rockker
Wonder if they will have Microsoft socks now :)

~~~
noir_lord
5 kinds and with a lot of work you'll be able to figure out which kind is
cotton if they put the people in charge of .net naming in control of the sock
buying division (which they probably should at that).

------
gist
On that page appears that the photo is a composite and mashed together from
various sources. And not a good job either.

~~~
ninju
Yeah...looks like only the first, and maybe the second, guy was really on the
stairwell. All the other people appear to be photoshopped in :-)

------
grumpydba
If microsoft invests significantly in plsql support and oracle compatibility
they can bleed Oracle bug time.

------
CSDude
Great news for another Turkish company acquistion, I wonder what was the
acquisition price.

------
aidos
It’s a very unsettling future we’ve ended up in where I see that Citus has
been purchased and I’m pleased in was by _Microsoft_.

------
iKevinShah
What are the odds that Citus's Enterprise is released to community version
like Github's private repos in near future?

------
gigatexal
I wonder if the Citus folks will have any influence on the future of
SQLSERVER. Maybe they’ll bring a plug-in system to it?

------
yahyaheee
This is awesome, congrats. Any chance you all may change the license to
something more permissive? :fingers crossed:

------
coverband
Congrats to folks at Citus -- they've matured quickly to reach this point in
just a couple of years.

------
akerro
genuine question:

Why people think this is good, but MySQL acquisition by Oracle was bad? Both
companies have internal conflict of interest by already owning close-source
SQL servers, both companies have history of attacking opensource communities.

~~~
detaro
I wouldn't say it is "good", but two reasons why it probably isn't so bad:
Citus is a company active in Postgres, it's not "the Postgres company" like
MySQL AB was. Their business model seems like it fits to what Microsoft is
doing now, so the open-source part is hopefully not in real danger.

------
ksec
That means PostgreSQL will hopefully get more resources development upstream.

------
brightball
Whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat!?

Is this a move to defend SQL Server or expand Azure’s PG offering?

~~~
rockker
I think SQL is a huge business for them already. This looks like for Azure and
OSS and expanding there.

------
jonathannorris
Congrats to the Citus Team! Really a great group of people over there.

------
gfody
I hope this means tPostgres or pgtsql gets some Microsoft resources!

------
lonk
Next achievement is selling the operating system to Micros~1

------
kod
Great news, their product is awesome and this will hopefully let more people
use it.

Knowing that Citus is available as an option if you need to scale makes
Postgres that much more compelling of a default choice for data store.

------
irisiert
The photomontage is pathetically bad...

------
elvinyung
Azure Cloud Spanner time?

~~~
rockker
it is known as Azure CosmosDB

~~~
elvinyung
I mean, isn't CosmosDB more like Cloud Datastore/Megastore?

~~~
janemanos
Think CosmosDB just is not too appealing with it's layered multi-model
approach compared to ArangoDBs native way to support multiple data models in
one db.

------
jbverschoor
crap :(

