Weekly Journal 162 - DNS, Data Gravity, Redis Rug Pull

Weekly Journal
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DNS

After getting my cloud backups handled, the next stage of my migration away from AWS is domain registration and DNS hosting. I haven’t found another cloud provider that has both registrar and DNS hosting services, so I will be adding another vendor to the equation. The two I’m currently looking at are DNSimple and Porkbun. DNSimple costs a little bit more for domain registration, but it looks like their DNS service is a bit more flexible and is supported by most major automation tools. With AWS’ recently announced price increase for domain registration, worst case is I continue paying about the same amount per month as I currently do with Amazon Route 53.

Data Gravity

Going through the process of moving my cloud backups has been a reminder that data generates a certain amount of gravity over time. The longer it sits in one place the more likely it is other systems will connect to that data to use it. The more things that are connected to a given data set the more difficult it becomes to move it. It wasn’t all that difficult to move my backups, but it’s very challenging to move a large database.

Redis Rug Pull

In a move that is disappointing but at this point no longer surprising, Redis has pulled the rug out from under its user community and terminated its open source licensing. Going forward new versions of Redis products will be licensed under their own proprietary “source available” license (RSALv2) and the Server Side Public License (SSPLv1). I honestly thought they already did something like this years ago so I haven’t really used Redis or paid attention to what they have been doing. Once again, after leveraging the community of users and open source contributors to help build their business, they are changing the rules so that they are the only ones who get to capture the benefit of that effort.

This just reinforces my opinion that you should be wary of adopting any “open source” software that is backed by investment capital. Ultimately the investors and founders are going to want to cash out and will do so at the expense of users and customers.