> The irony is that this may be a $0 revenue user for Grafana Labs.
Why is that ironic? Since Mimir is open-source, $0 revenue users are expected. AFAIK, Grafana Labs relies heavily on go, typescript, and linux, without necessarily being their top financial contributor. They could have kept Mimir proprietary like Splunk, but whether that would have attracted the same level of adoption or community contribution is another matter.
It already exists, it’s their Bring Your Own Cloud offering.
It’s to retain customers that grew big enough on Grafana Cloud to justify having their own in-house team run the tools instead. So Grafana offers them a pricing where the Grafana engineers operate the platform within the customer’s cloud account. Very large customers get to keep not having to operate and build/hire for the expertise, and save some money.
Sure some companies are big enough to make it worth it and still want to run their own OSS observability stack, but it’s generally not going to be popular with executive decision-makers, so it likely will remain rare. And if they do run it, Grafana still benefits from their contributions to AGPL code.
On the low-spending end, OSS users not buying cloud would not really be a serious revenue concern. They just don’t spend enough. You use cloud if tou have super broad product usage, so you don’t have to run and maintain Grafana, Mimir, Loki, Tempo, Pyroscope, k6, etc. all yourself.
If you don’t want or need all that, you run Loki+Grafana yourself and enjoy.
You can also build a mesh network using standard wireguard. While manual configuration requires exchanging keys and settings between devices, many ansible playbooks can automate this process with minimal effort.
Exactly! For instance, we had pull-based monitoring 20 years ago (Zabbix et al), but we abandoned it because it scaled poorly, favoring push-based agents (for InfluxDB, KairosDB etc). Now Prometheus is all the rage, yet we’re hitting the exact same scaling walls these systems had before. In a few years, we’ll rediscover push agents and call them the best thing since sliced bread.
Yup, same way people are starting to realise/remember having your compute next to your data is a good idea (maybe lambdas/serverless are not so hot because they get in the way of this).
Spacetimedb, convex, etc are basically the revenge of stored procedure.
> Ask a twenty-two-year-old to connect to a remote server via SSH. Ask them to explain what DNS is at a conceptual level.
Modern IT has become a ubiquitous commodity, much like the car. You don't need to know how an engine works to drive; while that knowledge might make you more efficient, it isn't strictly necessary to get from A to B. Besides, most twenty-two-year-olds ten years ago didn't know how to use ssh, either.
However, if you want to call yourself an engineer (and work in the field), you must understand the underlying mechanics. IMHO if you want to defeat a competitor today, you don’t need industrial espionage - you just have to cut their internet and/or AI subscriptions. Modern vibe engineers would struggle to function.
> The man page is dead for most users. The RFC is unread by most developers who depend on the protocols it describes.
Well, those who are accustomed to using man pages still use them today. I find them far more accurate than whatever an AI might spit out at any given moment. As for RFCs, they were always read by a small population - either those implementing the protocols or the few of us who like to brag about obscure technical details.
> You can now write complete programs without understanding what a single line of them does... until something goes wrong in production at two in the morning and you are completely without tools to respond.
I’m not worried about this. When things go south, there will still be experts who will know how to fix them. But since those experts will be fewer and farther between, they will likely charge $1k/hr, and rightfully so. If you are in that field, more power to you! :D
Used computers for about 35 years before the first time I first tried to "connect to a remote server via SSH". Go figure.
DNS is a phone book, I think!
But yeah, maybe "bad examples" by the author.
The one that really confuses me is this, though:
> You’ve built a generation that can’t extract a zip file without a dedicated app and calls it innovation.
Sorry, what are you saying? Software exists to unzip files. It used to be a "dedicated app" like WinZip, 7zip, WinRAR, etc. Now it's built into Windows. Or you use the 'unzip' command in Linux.
> However, if you want to call yourself an engineer (and work in the field), you must understand the underlying mechanics. IMHO if you want to defeat a competitor today, you don’t need industrial espionage - you just have to cut their internet and/or AI subscriptions. Modern vibe engineers would struggle to function.
True, but on the other hand, when I started programming (hell, even before the whole LLM craze began) and you took away my internet/stackoverflow/google I would also drastically lose productivity. Especially in my more junior years, and later, of course I could still write code, but if I had to figure out how a certain library worked or why a certain error in the auth layer happened, without internet I would be nowhere.
Either read the source code if you have it, or read the docs and do your best. That's how it worked when I was learning to code as a middle schooler in the early 90s.
In grad school I worked on TinyOS, and my advisor told me to print out the source code and spend a week reading it until I knew how to make the changes I wanted.
When I worked at Google there was no external documentation to use, so if you couldn't find the docs, you better figure out how to read the source. They have very good code search there.
I dont think the average power user needs to understand DNS. Knowing just that it can be changed (and can fix things or break things and whatnot) is probably already plenty.
Connecting to SSH seems like something a "power user" should be able to learn but not necessarily know already (probably more likely they know what a VPN is)
AFAIK Stripe and Plaid support only a fraction of the countries that PayPal does. And PayPal is still a global brand - recognized by almost everyone, everywhere.
"I’m not a mechanical engineer, but I watched a five-minute YouTube video on how a diesel engine works, so I can tell you that mechanical engineering is a solved problem."
> it assumes companies that are replacing labor with LLMs are willing to pay as much as (or at least a significant fraction of) the labor costs they are replacing.
And it’s worth reiterating that most (all) of these LLM/AI providers are currently operating at significant losses. If they aim to become even modestly profitable, prices will have to increase substantially.
True. But the US want to remain the country everyone relies on if it wants to preserve the dollar as the world's primary trade, reserve and settlement currency.
Dollar dominance gives the US disproportionate leverage over global finance and allows it to shape the rules of the system. Absent this asymmetry, it is difficult to imagine US tariffs or financial pressure (or any kind of pressure) would carry comparable global impact.
Why is that ironic? Since Mimir is open-source, $0 revenue users are expected. AFAIK, Grafana Labs relies heavily on go, typescript, and linux, without necessarily being their top financial contributor. They could have kept Mimir proprietary like Splunk, but whether that would have attracted the same level of adoption or community contribution is another matter.
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