Your "product" is what you sell. The owners of redis labs don't sell redis, they sell hosting, as far as I can see, in which case they made themselves a competitor to AWS, Azure, etc. And they don't have a competitive advantage in that. Also, why should AWS not compete back? Is a hosting company supposed to sit back and watch another hosting company just win business?
imiric|1 year ago
Sure they do. As the original authors of the product, they should have the best understanding of its features, and are in the best position to augment it in ways other pure hosting competitors can't or won't. They have first-mover advantage to build novel features, and integrate them into commercial propositions that benefit their customers first. They should also know best how to deploy and scale the product, even if their competitors excel at this.
If Redis Labs wasn't able to compete with AWS and other pure hosting providers, then they failed at taking advantage of their position. This is not an indication that the open core model can't be successful for both OSS users and the business. E.g. see Grafana.
Of course, this also depends on the nature of the product. A general purpose database or another core infrastructure product is much more attractive for hosting competitors than a purpose-built product.