
Compose Is Joining IBM - thomcrowe
https://www.compose.io/articles/compose-is-joining-ibm/
======
kylehotchkiss
What makes me most sad is that a really, really great product is being sucked
into a company who has no reason to offer services to a person like me.
Knowing I could spin up postgres for $18/month was pretty much the sweet spot
that gave me the confidence to want to do more personal, outside of work
projects. Heroku's $50/month offering is far too much. But I have a feeling
that this acquisition, like many others, means the end of the offering of a
product to the lone-wolf developer who wants to just build something for fun
that won't scale nor make money. I have literally no reason whatsoever to
believe IBM cares about the little guy but I'm okay and willing to be proven
wrong about that. I want to be proven wrong about that.

I don't want an email nor an empty promise. I honestly just want you guys to
keep the name "compose" and keep that cheap postgres option open for the long
run (years and years not weeks and weeks) so us folks who just want to build
something for fun have a quality database with a professional operation to
support it at the great pricing it is today.

~~~
mrkurt
This is important to us, and was a factor in our decision to go to IBM (which
is a little counter intuitive, given IBM's history). Our entire sales model is
predicated on people being able to start easily, and grow if they need to.
Price, self service-ness, and the content we produce are all important in this
model.

The thing about lone wolf developers, and side projects, and one off things
people hack together over the weekend is that they sometimes "flip" and become
big customers. That's when we win, and we monitor our funnel like crazy and
continuously see that it's working. Interestingly, some of the bad customer
experiences you see in this thread are the direct result of this model. We
aren't very good at handling one offs, or doing things by hand, or consulting,
because we focus so much on repeatable, self service offerings — which have to
work for small applications.

IBM is interested in three things from us. The technology is good, the team is
great, and the way we sell to customers is something they have told us they
firmly believe is the future of selling tools to developers. There's a really,
really good chance that you'll see other parts of IBM acting like us (and
building things for you) before you see us becoming all enterprisey.

We'll keep the name Compose (because it's fabulous!), we'll keep the cheap
Postgres option, and we'll do our best to keep that true for years and years.

For what it's worth, I greatly appreciate your comment.

~~~
chris_wot
I'm sorry, but you may think this is the way it goes, but I suspect you'll
find it isn't so. My prediction is that you will be booted as CEO within a
year, not because you aren't awesome but because you are a big part of Compose
and IBM will go directions you won't like.

Hope I'm wrong, but I can't see how this will be anything but disastrous. Your
key company abilities were you controlled your own destiny to a degree, and
you could react quickly. Now you are part of a larger group within IBM, I
doubt this will be possible.

I do wish you the best though, and that my dire prediction is completely
wrong. I've just seen what happens when a smaller company is bought by a
massive one.

~~~
mrkurt
Well I can't be CEO of IBM! Not this year, at least.

I've seen utterly awful acquisitions, and good acquisitions. You're right that
there's a lot we can't control, and we could be ground up by the big corp
machinations, but I do actually think IBM has a big interest in not screwing
us up. We shall see.

~~~
AdieuToLogic
If it helps any, from my prior observations in situations like this, you'll
know things are going bad when IBM starts "recommending" their personnel for
management positions in mid-level and above.

That's "the canary dying in the mine" to watch for IMHO.

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fps
This explains a lot. I've been a (large) customer of compose.io for several
years, and since the rename to compose support of our MongoDB clusters has
really gone downhill. They recently pulled much of the monitoring that was
available to us via MMS, they disabled New Relic monitoring for several months
with no explanation, and support has been awful for what we're paying - 13
hours for a first response on a CAT-1 issue, due apparently to a corporate
outing that took their entire support staff out of the office.

~~~
mwj
We have also found their support and general attitude towards us (as a long
term customer) getting worse recently, so much so that we are migrating off
their platform.

~~~
putlake
Who are you migrating to? I've been happy with Mongodirector (scalegrid)

~~~
mwj
Self hosting on AWS. The new MMS makes it pretty painless... clustering,
backups, alerting etc, better IOPS and about a third of the price of compose.

------
bstar77
I've been a customer for several years, never once had a problem with
reliability or performance. I've used several other services and nothing
compared to the simplicity of mongohq/compose. They've also had pretty great
support for some obscure issues I've had to deal with. Overall, I hope this
move just means more of the same.

------
WaltPurvis
All of the comments here that talk about price are saying how cheap Compose
is. Really? Looks like they charge $12 per gigabyte per month for PostgreSQL,
$18 for Mongo, and there's absolutely no free/hobbyist tier. That seems pretty
expensive to me, at least compared to the _other_ IBM cloud DBaaS offering,
Cloudant, which is priced at $1 per gigabyte per month and is completely free
if your bill is less than $50/month. Cloudant charges for transactions (gets
and puts), while it looks to me like Compose doesn't, but based on my
(admittedly limited) experience with Cloudant that wouldn't do very much to
close the yawning gap for most applications.

Would someone from Compose care to explain why their pricing isn't _really_
12X or 18X greater than Cloudant? (And whose pricing is going to change? I'm
kind of worried that IBM is going to quadruple Cloudant's prices, and then
quadruple them again, to bring them into line with Compose.)

~~~
mrkurt
Cloudant's pricing is so different than ours it's hard to compare. Our DBs are
all (currently) intended to be used real time, which means they could be
handling several thousand requests per second. I would guess that Cloudant's
pricing is similar to ours for DBs under load. Theirs just scales down in a
way we can't currently.

Cloudant's actually going to be really nice for our customers. Since our
service and pricing are meant for transactional databases, we've lost
customers and potential customers who had mountains of cold data they needed
to keep somewhere. As an independent company, that was the right choice, as
part of IBM we now have a good answer for those types of data loads. We hope
to be able to use our Transporter feature to make it relatively easy to keep
data moving around between DBs, Cloudant included.

------
nickpsecurity
Good job. I have an idea that _might_ benefit Compose now. Research projects
I've read on in IBM said that IBM allowed the internal use of any of its
software tools for free. They have a lot of really good ones that you'd
normally pay large sums for. I'm not sure if this policy (a) still exists or
(b) applies to companies they acquire. However, if I was Compose, I would ask
about it because IBM's tools & tech could greatly aid Compose in developing
their stuff faster, more robustly, etc.

Plus, I'm sure other startups might want to know whether this benefit exists
or not. Might even factor into a decision of whether a company wants to be
acquired by IBM vs another company. A 100+ free (or cheap) software products
would really really sweeten the deal to me if I was to continue working at the
company post-acquisition. Especially those delightful, bug-hunting and
productivity-boosting products. :)

Anyone on the inside know the answers to any of this?

~~~
cglace
Having worked at IBM briefly this is only partially true.

The way I understood it, IBM has a system called "blue dollars" or "blue
bucks" I forget which one. Basically, groups within IBM are given an allotment
of credits they can spend to "buy" other IBM products.

~~~
martin-adams
Ex IBM'er here and I recall it as Blue Dollars. I was in one of the UK labs so
'bucks' isn't a term we really use.

When it comes to software, you pretty much can use any IBM software you want
(or are told to). A lot of the Rational products were heavily pushed for teams
to use, although I think you had to justify why you use it. This caused some
contention, as I worked in automated UI testing and the capabilities of IBM
products vs open source alternatives varied quite widely. It was always fun
justifying your decision to management when the IBM product didn't match your
needs.

But when there is a service cost things are different. I got pulled into my
manager's office being showed my bandwidth and storage cost of my Lotus Notes
emails and was heavily encouraged to download my emails locally as the
department was charged. I think there were similar considerations when it came
to using backup software into their TSM - I don't remember exactly but have a
feeling you needed management approval to use it.

Then you have the consideration of building one product from another. For
example, I worked on WebSphere Application Server which was the app server of
many other IBM products. There you have the consideration of which departments
earn the revenue when a core product is shared.

~~~
nickpsecurity
So, the software is free for the lab and with no clear limit so long as you
fill out the forms and such?

~~~
martin-adams
Yeah I think so. It's been 5 years since I left so my memory of the detail
isn't a goods I would like :)

~~~
nickpsecurity
Appreciate it. Now I just gotta figure out if this applies to companies they
acquire and are integrating into their offerings. That's the original comment
I posted: Compose should use their tech where it's good and they get it
free/cheap.

------
compostor42
I've very curious what the general "impression" regarding IBM is around HN?
They are not discussed much around here.

~~~
tdicola
IBM is a financial engineering firm, not a technology company anymore:
[http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/the-truth-hidden-
by-i...](http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/the-truth-hidden-by-ibms-
buybacks/?_r=0)

~~~
devy
What people remember them the most, is their R&D. The beat Intel to create the
first 7nm chip process recently.

~~~
timelined
Between Alamaden (San Jose) and Yorktown Heights (NY) in the US, IBM is one of
the last few industrial basic sciences/engineering labs in the US, resembling
Bell Labs and Xerox PARC from a few decades ago.

------
sagivo
> We love being a distributed company. Many of us work from our homes and like
> to occasionally relocate for weeks or months at a time to work in other
> parts of the world.

I love this working style

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tptacek
Some of the hardest working people in show business. Congratulations!

~~~
nstott
this makes me happy! thanks

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gane5h
Congrats to the compose folks! IIRC, they acquired Cloudant a little while
ago.

~~~
amyjess
And Softlayer.

As a friend of mine who works there says, "IBM wanted to have a great cloud
business, so they bought one".

------
nfriedly
As an IBM'er, I think this is awesome news!

Cloudant is awesome for CouchDB, but if you want mongo or redis, we didn't
have a lot to offer before today.

Looking forward to working with you guys!

------
cj
I'd really love to see a MongoDB provider in between Compose.io and MMS.

We were on Compose for 1.5 years, but recently switched off to MMS after we
started running in to scaling issues.

Compose is a bit limiting if you need to tweak / monitor resources for
scaling, but running reliably on MMS means really understanding how your
deployment works (which might be the best long-term position to be in, but a
bit distracting for a ~5 person team).

It'd be great if Compose could offer a managed MongoDB service that ran off
instances in my ec2 account (so I'd pay base ec2 rates, plus a $50-150 per-
server fee for managing the deployment)

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rubiquity
This is the second "Cloud Database" company IBM has acquired recently. They
also acquired Cloudant, a CouchDB based "Cloud Database."

Side-thought: Did Compose refer to itself as a Cloud Database before IBM
acquired it? That seems like a very IBM marketing oriented term.

------
dejv
I just hope they are really keeping the pricing on current levels. I am
running couple of legacy apps there, but I guess it is better to prepare for
migration.

Any suggestion on similar services?

~~~
jsilvers
Pricing really isn't changing. Hope you stick around!

~~~
dejv
I am sure I am sticking around as long as possible, but it is always good idea
to be ready for all eventualities. Especially when you are running legacy apps
that you have no time to update, but still don't want to let them die.

Thanks to MongoHQ I was able to move one particular app three times to
different providers. It took no time, just upload the code, change DNS and you
are good.

------
vinhboy
Maybe off topic, but why are these hosted search engines so expensive? $45/mo
to start. Are there any $5/mo, low volume, machines for hobby developers?

~~~
nzadrozny
Relevant to my interests. Founder of ES host Bonsai.io.

Echoing mrkurt, ES is indeed hefty to run.

Elasticsearch is going to require a hundred+ megs of RAM just to run an empty
node. And then you'll want enough heap and CPU that you're not GCing yourself
to death while importing data, or while churning through filter and caches.
And then enough memory to run those fancy aggregations in Kibana. Times the
number of nodes you want for redundancy, and for your master-role quorum.

It's possible to do long-tail low-volume ES hosting for hobby development. But
to do so you need to dig in and consider ES hosting as a holistic system.
We've worked hard at Bonsai to build a hobbyist-friendly hosting system. Our
approach is to fork ES itself to introduce native multi-tenancy. That means
everyone in the cluster is amortizing the overhead of all that JVM memory (and
redundant data nodes, and master-node quorum, a load balancer and
authenticating reverse proxy, and analytics... etc...)

The problem remains that ES, while easy to spin up, is still a pretty heavy
system to manage at scale. So it's generally a lot easier to chuck some extra
resources at it, maximize your isolation, and eat the higher entry cost.

~~~
vinhboy
I don't really understand the technical limitations too much, but the hardest
selling point for me is that an ES Bonsai instance cost more than a Heroku
dyno.

I couldn't get over the fact that I have to pay more for one feature in my
app, than the entire cost of running the app...

I totally understand that the economics does not work out for you guys and
that sucks. Hopefully things will change in the future.

~~~
nzadrozny
Hmm. Considering Heroku dynos start at $0/mo for development, that may be an
apples and oranges comparison here ;)

In the context of reasonable hobby/development costs, I our $10/mo plan fits
well for that and is pretty popular. Pricing wise it compares well to a $7
dyno or $9 Postgres instance. And addons are prorated to the second, just like
dynos.

------
hangtime79
Welcome Compose team to IBM. I sit in analytics tech sales and work with CDS
(particularly Dash-DB) pretty regularly and am very excited to have you
aboard.

~~~
nstott
thanks, we're all pretty excited

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oomkiller
Taking a look at Bluemix, I already see most of the Compose offerings listed.
RethinkDB is missing though, are you discontinuing that product?

------
ukd1
Congrats guys!

~~~
thomcrowe
Pretty exciting!

